Almost a million people have given Songbird 1.0 a warm welcome. We thank you for that. We’ve listened to your feedback on Get Satisfaction, our blog and Bugzilla.
We want to keep bringing out the innovation you deserve. Here is your Songbird 1.1.

New Features

On demand Fetching of Album Artwork
Songbird can now fetch album artwork from the web at your command. Simply select or right-click a track and choose “Get Album Artwork”. You can also select your preferred source of artwork. By default, Songbird will retrieve album artwork from Last.fm but you can install other sources such as amazon.com via an add-on.

Watch Folders
You can choose to watch a folder hierarchy for changes and the content will auto-magically be imported in your library. If a file is removed from the watched folder, the corresponding track will be deleted from your Library.

Better Sorting
Library sorting supports unicode collation and better handling of leading definite and indefinite articles such as “The” and “a”.

Replay gain support (normalization)
If a track’s metadata contains replay gain (including iTunes-specific) information, Songbird will adjust the playback gain appropriately.

Improved Media Core & Better gapless playback
We rewrote the low level media core component for Windows to improve playback performance and lower cpu usage. Also, if an mp3 encoder places metadata information to indicate the exact beginning and end of the audio, Songbird is able to read it and use it to skip padding data that does not contain audio, leading to perfect gapless playback.

MTP Device Support
We fixed many bugs affecting MTP devices on Windows. We’ve also added the ability to synch authorized Windows Media DRM’ed content to your MTP device. To see if your MTP device is supported, or to report your findings, visit the MTP device page.

7digital MP3 Store (Beta)
Buy high quality MP3s (up to 320kbps) from the 7digital store in Songbird. The 7digital store in Songbird uses your most recently played tracks to recommend albums to you. Plus, 7digital contributes a portion of every purchase back to Songbird’s development. Every song you buy supports your favorite artist AND our development. Woot! The UK store is fully stocked, but the US and other European stores are still continuing to populate a complete catalog of music.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve continued to make the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Amongst other things, you should notice a smaller memory footprint and decreased CPU usage.

We made some substantial gains this release:

• Reduced memory use with a large library by 40%
• Cut CPU usage during playback by half
• Fixed playback memory leaks
• Made library caching configurable
• Added batching to the media importer, reducing memory use by 60%
• Reduced Mac download size 45%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix ten of the most common crashes in Songbird.

For Developers

• You can now invoke Songbird from a url. For instance,

  songbird:open?url=http%3A%2F%2Flast.fm

  will launch Songbird and open a new tab pointing to http://last.fm. For more information, review this article in our developer section.

What’s Next

Our goal is to continue to focus on building a world-class, open music player. Our next release will consist of continued focus on performance and stability gains, implementing additional audio features, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in Bugzilla.

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!