Cue the wanky music: you’ll need to be on Windows, and you’ll need to have iTunes installed to check out CD Rip  for this blessed build. This is due to an installer issue that we’re working through.  In short, Songbird and iTunes use the same underlying library to rip CDs (Gear Works). This blessed build will piggyback off the drivers that iTunes installed because we’re not quite ready to install the drivers ourselves. (Well, actually, we’re really good at installing the drivers but totally overzealous when uninstalling them.) Our own installer will be a well-behaved citizen of the registry in a few days, and once it is, we’ll put out another build that you non iTunes-y people can also use.

</end wanky music>

Our CD Rip feature includes:

- Ability for user to select all (default) or chose individual tracks for rip
- Ability for user to set/modify Rip CD Setting via a preference pane
- Ability for user to edit their metadata prior to and after rip
- Ability for user to select a CD record to rip should one or more similar records be found for the inserted CD.
- Integration for lookup of CD data information directly from the Gracenote database.

If you think you found a bug, super, you’re a helper! Before you log it in Bugzilla like the awesome tester you are, please make sure you check the release notes to make sure it’s not one of the bugs that we fixed while spinning this build. We’re fast, we know.

• New UI – We are still adding the final touches to the UI but we went ahead and made it the default in the hopes of getting more eyes on it. The new UI includes significant visual and functional changes such as:
  • A new dedicated tab that contains all of your media content
  • Ability to show/hide the service pane when viewing webpages (it’s automatically hidden when viewing web content, but a button will allow you to toggle show/hide)
  • Ability to choose where the player controls live, the top or bottom of the window, based on user preference (View menu -> Player Controls or right click on the player control pane)
• Faster Media Scan – Scanning for media on your local drive should be super fast now. We did a quick test and saw that scanning in 1,000 tracks took half as much time as before. We’re curious to hear what kinds of improvements you see when scanning in your music collection.
• First Run Wizard – The wizard will walk you through EULA, media scanning, and installing recommended add-ons when launching the application for the first time. You’ll need to create a new profile to be presented with the wizard.
• Drag & Drop – You should be able to drag and drop all sorts of things in the application now. Give it a try and let us know if you think we’ve missed anything that you think you might want to drag and drop.

Any feedback or bug report that you send us is going to make the final release build that much better – please keep them coming!