Thanks to everyone who has been providing feedback to our latest RC’s. This update contains bug fixes and final tweaks. We’re closing in on a Final build and would like to make sure that you don’t see anything you might consider a show stopper.

To learn more about what’s new, check out the RC3 release notes.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 1.0 final!

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in RC2 and get your feedback on:

• Importing iTunes libraries will no longer trigger a hang.
• Using the the Windows Media Playback and QuickTime Playback add-ons we’ve brought back the ability to play pre-authorized DRM media: WMA DRM on Windows; Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
• mashTape has been updated and will no longer invoke Flash player security warnings.
• We’ve adjusted the buffer size for streaming media but we’re still working on the final setting. If you think it’s too high you can adjust it by following these steps.
• Video support has been temporarily removed from the application. Our move to GStreamer introduced some new video related bugs that couldn’t be addressed in time for this release. Since video has been an unsupported feature we decided that this was the prudent thing to do for now. You can absolutely count on us re-introducing video support in a future release down the road!
• When viewing Album art at fullsize you can now easily close the window.
• When clicking on a track in the library invoking inline editing of metadata is now less likely to appear when you weren’t looking for it.
• We resolved a number of bugs that could crash the application (thanks for always submitting your crash reports. Your anonymous data really helps us track down issues!)

The RC2 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 1.0 final!

Bloggers & Press: This release is not our final 1.0 product and is not ready to be reviewed. Since we’re still landing code we suggest postponing any review of the Songbird Player until our Final 1.0 product is released. If you’re interested in reviewing the 1.0 build feel free to contact us at: press [at] songbirdnest [dot] com. We’ll be more than happy to give you access to it prior to launch. Thanks for the care and attention you’ve shown Songbird over the past year.

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in RC1 and get your feedback on:

• Audio Playback: We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system across all platforms – this means higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.
• Album Art: The album artwork feature now supports drag and drop of images, as well as, the ability to toggle between displaying artwork for playing or selected tracks.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: We’ve cleaned up our keyboard shortcuts this release (and added some new ones for power users). Look for the link to a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in the application’s Help menu.
• Smart Playlists: By popular request we’ve implemented the ability to use a smart playlist as a rule within another smart playlist.
• Performance Enhancements: We’ve improved many aspects of the application performance. Most notably, importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.

The RC1 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 1.0 final!

Bloggers & Press: This release is not our final 1.0 product and is not ready to be reviewed. Since we’re still landing code we suggest postponing any review of the Songbird Player until our Final 1.0 product is released. If you’re interested in reviewing the 1.0 build feel free to contact us at: press [at] songbirdnest [dot] com. We’ll be more than happy to give you access to it prior to launch. Thanks for the care and attention you’ve shown Songbird over the past year.

I’ll list some pros and cons:

Pros:

• The title bar will inherit styles defined by the OS – eg: rounded corners, title text beveling, aqua/graphite buttons.
• The window will behave like any other window – eg: resizing is faster, dragged between spaces works, window shadow is native, ability to show/hide the tool bar.
• Modal dialogs appear as sheets that are attached to the window which means that modal dialogs will always be modal. (this is specific to Mac OS)

Cons:

• Lose the ability to right click on the title bar to toggle between layouts and feathers. You can still switch feathers using the View menu. The default key combination for toggling between layouts on Mac OS is command + shift + m.
• The title bar will look out of place if the rest of the application is not styled to match the OS. Gonzo’s current visual design matches Mac OS pretty well so no worries here.

Given these points, how would you feel if we turned on the native title bar on Windows and Linux? Keep in mind that turning on the native title bar would mean that the rest of the application would need to be updated to reflect the OS theme to match the title bar. So the real question is: Would you like it if Songbird matched your OS theme by default just like Firefox? Here’s a sneak peak…

By the way, we are just talking about the default feather here. We’ll make sure that any decisions we make wont affect feathers developed by the community.

You have been blogging Songbird’s Beta launch, providing community feedback, often supporting each other, reporting technical issues, and twittering your Songbird critiques and delights.

From the sb_core developer to the add-on hacker to the blog reviewer, you make Songbird rock!

Thanks to everyone who has been providing feedback to our latest RC’s. This update contains bug fixes and final tweaks. We’re closing in on a Final build and would like to make sure that you don’t see anything you might consider a show stopper.

To learn more about what’s new checkout the RC3 release notes.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.7 final!

Here are the most noteworthy features we’d like to call out in RC2 and get your feedback on:

• Smart Playlists: Create playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set.
• Album Art: Read, write and display album artwork. There’s a new Album Art Display Pane in the bottom of the Service Pane that shows the artwork associated with currently playing track. In the Metadata Editor, you can add, remove, cut, copy and paste artwork to a track – changes will be saved to the file(s) you edit.

The RC1 blog post has a list of additional features we’ve been working on for this release.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.7 final!

For those interested, here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in RC1 and get your feedback on:

• Refreshed UI: refined look and feel
• New setup assistant: get up and running in Songbird with ease (requires a fresh profile)
• Smart playlists: create dynamic playlists based on criteria you set
• Concert calendar: find upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your library
• Last.fm support: scrobble the tracks you play and love or ban them
• GStreamer on all platforms: this is our first cross platform release using GStreamer as our new media core, by default it handles all FLAC playback on Windows/Mac (or you can enable GStreamer to handle more codecs)
• Zippier metadata reading: much faster media scanning
• Reduced memory usage on Windows/Linux: we landed jemalloc as the applications memory allocator

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.7 final!

Birdwatchers, as you’ve noticed, we recently made our old forums read-only. While they served us well over the years, we were in need of an upgrade.

In their stead, we will be using Google Groups for our developer forum. As some of you already know, Google Groups provides a simple way to keep up with new and on-going discussions without distraction.

For our user community we’re going to be using Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction provides a quick and easy way to give us feedback on Songbird. You can ask a question, share an idea, report a problem, or start a discussion, as well as search previously posted topics.

Tips for posting on Get Satisfaction:

• Always search to see if someone else has already posted your idea, problem, or topic.
• If you find an existing topic, please add your comments there. Get Satisfaction also has a great facility to vote for ideas and track multiple users with the same question. Look for the ‘I have this question, too!’, the ‘I have this problem too!’, and the ‘I like this idea’ buttons.
• Be as detailed as you can. In order to file a bug, we need to know your operating system, Songbird version, and detailed steps to reproduce your bug. If you’re filing a feature suggestion, the same is true, tell us exactly what you want so there’s no guess work later on.
• If you’re accustomed to using tags, please tag your posts, that’ll help us organize and find them later.

What is Bugzilla?
A lot of the time, you’ll find that we’ve already got a bug or feature suggestion filed in Bugzilla, our bug and feature tracker, for something you are inquiring about. Bugzilla is not a forum, it’s a software life-cycle tool; the engineering and product teams use it to track the progress of the release. If you’re interested in following the progress of these bugs or features, you will need a Bugzilla account. If you don’t have a free Bugzilla account, signing up is quick and easy and will allow you to share your feedback directly with the development team.

If you’re going to file a bug or feature suggestion, please always search before you file, and provide adequate detail.

To track the activity on a Bugzilla entry via email:

1. Going to the “people” box in the upper right hand corner of the page.
2. Add your email in the “add cc” box
3. Scroll down and hit commit.

We’ll be checking GetSatisfaction Monday thru Friday and we’ll try to respond as quickly as we can. If you don’t see a response to your post, fear not, we’re most likely tracking down an answer or, in over our heads in work! Meanwhile, to those who have already posted in our new forums, thank you for the feedback, your comments and suggestions provide much needed detail for our product and engineering teams and help us make more informed decisions.

The new add-ons site is (a)live!

We killed the crufty old bugger and worked a little re-animation magic to bring you the healthy 8 pound, 2 ounce site we have today. He babbles more than he talks, but he’s already up and walking around.

As stated previously, our 2 main goals are to make it easier for you to find add-ons you find interesting and to improve the overall experience for developers. We ended up having to rewrite the site from scratch, but we’ll now be able to add new features more quickly and more easily.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks!