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.

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!

Download Songbird 0.5rc1 (release notes)

For all the Windows users out there, we have a shiny new treat, 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. FYI – the extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Songbird 0.5 includes a new Device API that allows developers to easily add device support to Songbird. Our new MTP support is built on it, and we are in the process of porting our iPod Device Support extension to it. In the interim you may notice some issues with iPod support.

This release also introduces the ability for developers to create alternate graphical presentations for Libraries and playlists, called Media Views. Mig created an example Media View called the Artist Detail List which can be installed from the Add-on Site.

Add-on developers – Now would be a good time to make sure that your add-on is compatible with 0.5.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 0.5 final makes it out the door.

Here are some additional resources for developers:

• API Changes Since 0.4
• Getting started with Media Pages
• How to update 0.4 Feathers to 0.5
• Full list of bugs fixed (200+)