As many of you know we’re hard at work on NOFX and the release is looking really good – lots of cool improvements, including video playback. Some of you have noticed that the Linux version has fallen behind, leading to some heated, but healthy debate internally about how to prioritize the development hopper.

After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird. Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache.
 We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices.

While our Linux users are some of the most passionate, do some killer development, and always provide tremendous input as to whether we’re on the right path or not, we simply can’t continue to support a Linux version as we have in the past.

And, like you, we can’t stand to see our Linux product be anything less than outstanding. Unfortunately, we can’t make that happen right now. Trade-offs are hard, and this is one of the most painful decisions in the history of the company.

We remain loyal to Linux and the ideology it represents, so we will maintain a version of the software for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform. We’ll make that version available to the community. We will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. That said, those builds will not be tested and may not pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team.

When we roll out NOFX for Windows and Mac at the end of the month, you’ll see video support – import, library management and full screen playback. We are also working on full compatibility with Windows 7 as well as support for a range of new handsets.

UPDATED 4/5/2010 @ 2:22 pm PST

To those who voiced their disappointment and retained a civil tone, we
empathize with you. We appreciate all of the passion from the community, we again want to re-iterate that this was a very tough decision for us. We want to clarify a couple of points:

• Songbird remains open source. The code is mirrored from our working tree and available at http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/
• We are maintaining our Linux build infrastructure and will ensure that it continues to compile and run the unit-test suite. http://buildbot.songbirdnest.com/
• Nightly Linux builds will remain available at http://developer.songbirdnest.com/builds/trunk/latest/
• We have in house developers that use Linux every day and they will keep developing Songbird on Linux.

We also want to share some facts that may bring additional perspective about our decision.

(1) Measured by application usage on at least 3 distinct days within 30-day period
(2) Measured by OS user agent used by community reporting a bug in last 30 days
(3) Measured by OS user agent used when add-on was submitted to addons.songbirdnest.com in last 30 days
(4) Measured by OS user agent used when translation was submitted to translate.songbirdnest.com in last 30 days
(5) Google Analytics data for visits to getsongbird.com for year 2009
(6) Percentage share of OS from web clients (source wikipedia.org)

Comments for this post will close on Tuesday 4/6 @ 5 pm PST.

Since GStreamer was mainly a Linux project it required us to port it to OS X and Windows, which we got working in late March. By July, we had GStreamer integrated in both Mac and Windows nightlies, albeit only supporting limited formats. In December, we’ve made our 1.0 release available which uses GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms.

Because of its open plugin architecture, we were able to assemble the necessary codecs to legally support playback of MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac (protected closed formats such as WMA DRM and Fairplay are still supported with additional cores).

On Linux, we are happy to announce that we’ve licensed the Fluendo mp3 decoder. Fluendo is a company that specializes in delivering multimedia products. They are also well known for their support of the development of the GStreamer multimedia framework. Fluendo also provides other GStreamer plugins to allow playback of format such as WMA on Linux for instance. You can purchase those through their online shop directly.

The community will benefit from all the hard work that went into this since we now have the foundation work in place to develop additional audio features such as normalization, cross fading and EQ. See our roadmap for more details.

I’ll be talking about Songbird, Linux and the Media Web at LugRadio Live USA this weekend. The conference is being held all weekend at the Metreon in San Francisco and you can get in for the low low price of ten dollars!

My session is at 2pm on Sunday but there’s a ton of other exciting stuff going on all weekend. LRL is primarily a Linux conference so there’s a bunch of interesting talks about kernels, servers and all those fun toys, but there’s a bunch of media and free culture stuff going on too. Aaron Bockover is going to be talking about Banshee, our friendly rival open source desktop media player. Mike Linksvayer is going to present on the Creative Commons. Joe Born from Neuros is going to talk about how they’re using open source and involving the community in their hardware player platform. David Schleef, a local GStreamer developer is presenting too – he’s been working most recently on Schrödinger, an implementation of the Dirac codec. And there’s going to be Aza Raskin and Chris Blizzard from Mozilla there as well.

On top of all that there’s going to be a couple of parties – on Friday night at the Thirsty Bear and the official party on Saturday night at Jillians – when Google will be putting money on the bar. I’ll be around for most of the weekend and I think a few other Songbird hackers will be around too. If you’re in the neighborhood come down to the Metreon. Did I mention, only ten dollars!

There’s lots more stuff getting fixed all the time, but those are 3 of the major things to happen recently. All in all I’m thrilled that I can join the rest of team hunting down these other bugs. The Bird is stable enough to listen to music all day and I can surf the web and download and listen to music from sites.

Giddy Up.

I had to install the libtasn1 package and then create a link like so:

yum install libtasn1
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libtasn1.so.3 libtasn1.so.2

Also, to get mp3 playback I needed to install the gstreamer-plugins-ugly package to get libmad for decoding of mp3 files. Those were the only 2 steps I needed to do. But if you don’t have gstreamer at all then you’ll need to install that package first.

There are still a few bugs to work out in the playback support. Right now pausing actually causing the player to skip to the next track and I’m seeing some weird behavior where it won’t advance to the next track, as if the playerLoop isn’t starting, or getting stopped.

His efforts getting that building have also netted us a new playback core on Linux, namely the Totem plugin. He’s finishing up some API work on the plugin itself so we can have the functionality we require and then we’ll get it in and turned on for both 32bit and 64bit Linux. We’re using GStreamer as the core behind the Totem plugin.

We also moved to a more current version of XULRunner for this last nightly. I’ve been running for a few days now with greatly reduced crashes. It’s not clear if it was the move to the new XULRunner or all the cleanup work we’ve been doing but Linux is certainly getting more stable. Cheers for that. (Note: I’ve been seeing some startup crashes latelty that look like our corruption bug, but once I get past – about 3 restarts – it’s really solid – not invincible but solid, even surfing to webpages with playlists )

That’s all for the update, I’ll try and start posting more often with tidbits about the pieces I’m working on. We’ll see how that goes.

If you are crashing all over the place ( particularly with JS_GC in your stack ) and are inclined to applying a patch, or are just one of those helpful people who like to test patches, throw that patch at your Bird and comment in the bug if you see improvements/regressions etc.

I should be landing it Wed afternoon.

Songbird’s public Subversion tree is open. Initial build instructions have been posted to the Songbird Trac. Developers may download the source via HTTP or BitTorrent. Please report bugs and post patches to Songbird Bugzilla.

Note that this our not-yet-0.2 source code release, which means it is not yet our 0.2 “Developer Preview” release as defined in our Songbird roadmap. The internal birdbuilder team will be substantially changing numerous APIs between now and the 0.2 launch. Eager Songbird extension authors should wait for the 0.2 “Developer Preview” launch.

Finally, Songbird not-yet-0.2 binaries are available for Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. We’ll frequently update the binaries to reflect the latest source changes.

Build the bird, play the Web.
Rob

Update: Songbird’s not-yet-0.2 has been Dugg! And Slashdotted!

So I modified our XUL to follow the same layout and it didn’t work. Well, I thought it was probably a “loading plugins in XUL” bug, why don’t I see if the original webpage loads and works. Nope. So now it looks like a “plugins on Linux in XULRunner” bug. At least the problem is getting scoped.

In other news, the work mig has been doing to get metadata to show up is working on linux and there is finally metadata for the local tracks.