We decided it was time to move from alpha to beta for the following reasons:

• Refreshed the UI
  We’ve been working hard on making the application more consumer friendly. Hopefully, both new users and experienced users will find the new user interface simpler and more intuitive. We’ll continue to ensure that the Songbird voice comes through in the design.
• Identified Songbird 1.0 Platform Support
  We locked down the platforms we’ll be supporting for 1.0 they are: Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X Intel Machines, Linux 32- and 64-bit.
• Shipping a New Media Core
  Nightly users have already had a sneak peak at running Songbird with GStreamer on all of our supported platforms. By default, it’s only supporting FLAC playback but in our 1.0 release it will be our default media core for all media playback!
• Landed Numerous Core Media Player Features
  We’ve landed metadata reading/writing, have enhanced our drag & drop functionality, enabled syncing to MTP and iPod devices, and are days away from shipping support for album artwork and smart playlists.
• Performance and Optimization Improvements
  We’ve worked on making the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Users will notice that searching, scrolling, importing media and reading metadata are at or very near the needs of a daily use media player.

Our plan is to ship Songbird 1.0 before the end of 2008. We’re putting the finishing touches on planning the feature work that you can expect in the 1.0 application. We’ll update the Roadmap as soon as our planning work is complete.

By going into beta we are signaling that a wider audience of users are qualified to start using the application. The more feedback we can get in the upcoming months will help us ensure that we ship a 1.0 that we can all be proud of and use daily. Now back to wrapping up the current release!