Download Songbird 0.5 (release notes)

New in 0.5

0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features:

MTP Device support
Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.

Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. We’ve streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.

New List Background
After several requests from our community we’ve made our Library and Playlist backgrounds easier on your eyes. Keep sending us your ideas, suggestions, and requests, your feedback helps us improve the ‘bird!

Improved Rating UI
We’ve clarified the rating widget display by showing circles for unrated items and improved usability by allowing you to more easily change or un-rate a track.

Hot Keys on the Mac
Mac users, you can now use common hot-keys to quit, hide, or open Songbird preferences just like the rest of your applications. We also fixed the issue which allowed the application to be dragged under the menu bar, yay!

Always on Top
Never lose your Rubberducky Mini Player under a stack of windows! Now you can set it to always be on top. Any Feather developer can expose this feature in their feather.

Developer Resources

New Webpage API Events and Listeners
The Webpage API features new events you can observe. The events, and examples on how you can observe them, are detailed here.

Media Views Guide
We’ve created a Media Views guide to help you get started.

Always on Top
It’s now a simple install.rdf change for Feathers developers to flag their Feathers as capable of supporting Always-on-Top.

Feather Updater Guide
We’ve also added a guide on updating 0.4 Feathers to be 0.5 compatible.

Release Notes

We’re in the early stages of migrating our iPod Device Support Add-on to Songbird’s new device API so you’ll notice it’s missing from the 0.5 Add-ons bundle. Note that while you can still manually add the iPod extension to 0.5 it is known to exhibit issues. Fret not, the update will be released either in 0.6 or shortly after the launch (which should land in late May/early June.) Stay tuned, additional details on what’s planned for 0.6 coming soon!