Significant progress has been made for browsing large libraries as well as searching. We’re hoping that most of you will have a much better experience if you have a library that’s 25,000 tracks and larger. For the curious, I usually do performance work and testing using a 65,000 track library with 8 genres, 1074 artists and 3170 albums.

Most of the work this week was focused on search performance. The last round of fixes will be in the nightly build that will be up tomorrow. The build number should be 1824 or greater. If you are testing using the nightly build, creating a new profile is recommended. You can do so by using the Songbird (Profile Manager) link in the Start Menu or by starting the application with the -ProfileManager command line argument.

Feedback is always appreciated. If you run into problems and post a comment, some quick stats about your library size, total number of genres, artists and albums as well as your operating system is very helpful.

Thanks everyone, and have a great weekend!

EDIT:

LiveSearch has been fixed. The next nightly build will have all the necessary fixes (Build #1827).

The current nightly builds already show really good improvement when using the filter panes and search. If you’re curious, you can go and try it out now by grabbing a nightly build.

Here are some links to the performance bugs we’re tackling for the Pink Floyd release which already show significant improvement in the nightlies.

• Bug 21545 – [perf] 1.7.3 filter pane view very slow (plus start up very slow).
• Bug 21385 – [perf]Terrible performance browsing a large library.
• Bug 21474 – [perf] Library search is slow.

I’ll be posting some follow ups as work progresses.

• We’ve already started working on increasing speed and response times for large libraries. We’ve heard this request loud and clear and we’ve made it a priority to improve things in 0.6.
• The MTP add-on for Windows will be extended to include sync functionality so you can more easily manage media on your portable devices.
• The iPod add-on will be migrated to our new device API. This will fix a bunch of bugs and allow us to maintain all of our device support in a single code base. It will also give us an opportunity to test the extensibility of the 0.5 device API and allow iPod support to benefit from features and UI improvements we roll into MTP support (and vice versa).
• Songbird will be adding the ability to write metadata changes back to your media files. This will include a new UI and will be our first time managing your data. We’re planning on adding Album artwork write back in a future release.

We’ll also be:

• Adding contextual menus and find functionality in the browser component of Songbird based on your requests.
• Cleaning up the View menu (so that switching Feathers, Views, and Display Panes is clearer).
• Continuing work on UI bugs to polish and improve the overall user experience.

While the goal is to land our MTP and iPod add-ons with the 0.6 release it is worth noting that due to the complexities and dependencies in these projects we might end up releasing them shortly after 0.6 launches. Everything else is scheduled to go out with the release. The current plan is to ship 0.6 final in the late May/early June timeframe. Until then, please continue to send us your feedback and file bugs as you find them.

The down side is that your current Songbird library will not be compatible with future versions of Songbird, starting with tonight’s nightly. The fix is easy — simply delete your profile and re-import your library. There is another option for those who would prefer to keep their libraries, but it takes some skills. It involves using the sqlite command line tool and running a migration script on each of your Songbird library database files. If you’re gung-ho to give this a try, Peter documented the steps on our wiki.