First Place and the Fan Favorite Award both go to schwadegan

Second place, and hot on schwadegan’s tail for the fan favorite vote goes to grone1985

Third place goes to RockBagFullOfCrap

An honorable mention goes to mpurses. Sadly this video was submitted late, so it was technically disqualified, but if you want a quick overview of popular Songbird add-ons it’s worth a watch.

We really appreciate everyone who participated in the contest, and we think you’re all winners! If you submitted a video (even if it did not win) please email me at laura@songbirdnest.com with your YouTube user name, your real name and your mailing address and I’ll get your prize mailed out to you right away.

Farewell my fine feathered friends

In other news, I am so sad to announce that this will be my final Birdbath as I’ve joined another flock. I know this community will be in excellent hands with Songbird employees and our super duper champions and trust you’ll all pull together to help new birds find their wings. It’s been such a pleasure to fly with you all and I can’t wait to see where this bird is going next!

I wanted to remind you that tomorrow, October 30th, is the last day to submit your video for our Songbird Demo Video Contest. A few more submissions have rolled in so head here to cast your fan favorite votes.

Also, I see some of you have been busy pitching in on the device testing front, so thanks!

Other than that, how about you guys tell me what’s up for a change?

Last week I introduced you to Alfred Peng. Another developer new to our flock needs no introduction, assuming you run Firefox. Chances are you have already downloaded Adblock Plus, one of the most useful extensions for Firefox, developed by our own Wladimir Palant. Wlad has been kicking a$$ and taking names on performance related bugs, making Songbird’s speed and stability his number one focus. One of his biggest fans created a wiki page devoted to watching the performance related bugs Wlad has been knocking out, so if you’ve noticed your bird has been gaining some speed, you know who to thank.

Our Frenchbirds attended the JDLL conference last week and spread the bird word. They gave Songbird demonstrations on Windows and Linux and got feedback from users about what types of extensions they’d like to see going forward. France isn’t the only place where Songbird needs a little more shine. Another contributor plans to spread the bird word in Serbia. We’ll take all the help we can get!

A fancy–pants AJAX/JSON driven web interface for Songbird

We have another community plea for some dev love to build an add-on that would enable APE support. As Mike explained, we worked hard to insure that it was easy to write add-ons that would enable support for additional formats knowing that we wouldn’t be able to focus our development time on all the various formats we don’t currently support. If you need some help getting going, the Developer Center is the place to start.

Speaking of developers, meet Alfred Peng. Alfred joined our team about a month ago by way of OpenSolaris where he worked with SteveL. He wasted no time hopping into Get Satisfaction threads and knocking out bugs so a lot of you probably already noticed he’s a rock star. I asked him what excited him about the project and what he was looking forward to working on. I think you’ll enjoy what he had to say!

As a contributor to the Mozilla community, I’m also a big fan of Mozilla-related products. That’s the initial motivation for the Songbird porting job I did at the first stage. From my perspective, Songbird’s open source strategy, its potential to provide a media player solution to the public, the contribution to the open music movement, lots of positive feedback from the community, and the great team here make me really excited about our future.

I’d really like to see improved performance (tune with DTrace?), improved device support, improved integration with the web service and a smaller memory footprint. The upcoming CD Rip and video (probably in the next release) are also wonderful features. Apart from that, improved add-on availability on Linux/OpenSolaris platform (device support for example) and improved integration on Linux/OpenSolaris (work with Mozilla community to upstream the patches we have) would also be awesome to have.

I do notice some other cool ideas from the community as well, for example, the design for the next generation of MediaFlow, the Songbird awesome bar etc. Those are the things that could help Songbird achieve better success I believe. So thanks for the work! –Alfred Peng

The Development and QA teams have been burning the midnight and weekend oil to bake these builds and bust these bugs and all they’re getting out of it is a never ending supply of Indian and Thai food. That and your undying gratitude of course. Think happy thoughts of them while you ride your bike or head to a movie this weekend as they’ll all be living vicariously through you until this release goes live.

Several of you reported a virus warning you received via Bugzilla, Twitter and Get Satisfaction yesterday. Mozilla reported that AVG confirmed it is a false positive that will be removed in the next Definitions update, so there’s no cause for alarm and you can fly your bird without worry. Thanks for all the looking out!

It seems like all we’ve been talking about lately is Blessed Build this, and Beta that when the real news is that we’ve migrated to a new nest! We’ve been pretty nomadic as far as birds go this past year, but this place will give us plenty of room to grow our flock, so hopefully we can rest our wings and stay for a while.

Not only do we have more room…

But there’s fancy stuff like rooms for us to meet in and a place for us all to eat lunch together. Even our bikes have more room.

The best part just may be the view from the top…

That or being closer to all our fave lunch spots again, which is good since our all-hands and company lunch got canceled today in the interest of unpacking and staying focused on getting Kanye shipped out.

Tag this

Tagger, by Horazant is a powerful tool to generate, modify and save metadata and tags into Songbird. By utilizing this add-on you can make your library do all sorts of tricks it couldn’t do before. Klint is a Tagger power user and potentially its biggest fan. If you take a moment to look through his profile you’ll see a lot of tips and tricks to get the most out of this awesome extension. I doubt I’m alone in hoping Tagger is an add-on featured in our Video Demo Contest so we can learn more about all it is capable of.

Frenchbirds hit the road

Frenchbirds, our European ambassadors, will be representing Songbird in Lyon at the JDLL Software Freedom Day October 16th and 17th, 2009. If you find yourself in their neck of the woods, pop in for a demo and some schwag. Check out their blog for more information.

Last week we asked for some add-on dev love and Simon answered the call. Check out his Audio Bookmarks add-on and leave him a review or some feedback in the comments field. Simon gave me the inside scoop that he’s working on some big add-on ideas of his own but he likes taking breaks to build stuff the community is hungry for. What a swell guy!

Another video was submitted for the demo contest this week. There’s still plenty of time to submit your entry, but even if you don’t create your own you should come join the group and vote for your favorites as they roll in. There’s only two submissions so far (don’t forget there are three prizes!) and it’s been so fun to see what has been getting highlighted.

Lunch was an Italian feast of pesto ravioli, meat lasgana, veggie pasta, meatball and sausage subs, and a spinach salad tossed in for good measure. It also happens to have been our last company lunch in this office. Once again we’re migrating to new digs and the birds are all aflutter about it! More on the new aviary next week.

You can expect even more mistakes and typos this week as a sleepy spell has been cast over the office thanks to Little Skillet and their Chicken and Waffles. I mean, if we’re serving breakfast and fried food for lunch, a cot should be provided.

Last week our Podcast Subscription Support thread was so active I think it caused global internet slowdowns. However it did result in some awesome developer/community dialog which I think this topic was in desperate need of (thanks again pvh). One important thing that resulted from the conversation was the realization that we’re not so far off from a short term solution while we finish baking the whole project. So consider this an SOS for some add-on developer love. Any takers?

There’s a new tweeter in town. If you like Songbird and you like to Twitter, you should follow SongbirdFans. Its founder, Richard just burst onto the Get Satisfaction scene a week and a half ago, but he’s a long time user and is already proving to be a helpful and knowledgeable member of the community. He knows a lot about the different add-ons available and has been offering some great tips and tricks so if you have a quick question, you should give him a shout.

Just as I was about to hit publish our first video contest submission rolled in, thanks grone1985! I can’t wait for more to follow. W00t!

Hello you lucky birds, welcome to a super special Tuesday edition of the Birdbath. I’m smashing the best of last week and this week together into one big bath. What can I say? The Bay Bridge was closing, there was a company BBQ, a holiday weekend was approaching and I honestly didn’t realize how much you’d miss me our lunch menu. Delicious meatball, sausage and eggplant subs by the way. I really am sorry I left you hanging, but I’m more than a little delighted to learn that you love your weekly preening.

At least one sleuthing bird didn’t need me to tell them that our own SteveL was interviewed on How Software is Built. If you’re interested in where we’re heading and how we’re planning on getting there, you should find it interesting. It also covers some of the burning questions you have voiced about Apple and how we plan to make any money if it’s all free. Check it out!

Some very busy birds put their beaks together to make something cool happen last week. Thanks to a whole flock of feathered friends you can now GET control of your network via the web. As one user said, their “dreams have come true.” gfxmonk got the ball rolling with the add-on, GeekShadow quickly hopped in, then boosh and jhlassen17 joined the party and now there’s a wiki tutorial and iGadget to boot so you can even get control if you don’t have your own web space.  It’s birdacious.

Last but not least, it’s contest time. A few weeks back one of our champs suggested that we solicit videos from our super star users to showcase how you use Songbird.

A compelling user demonstration will focus on what makes Songbird unique. What are your favorite features and add-ons? What tips and tricks do you use to boost your Songbird experience? Show us your bird’s style and how you make it fly to your own beat. The winning videos will be featured on our wiki and will be linked from our Get Satisfaction homepage.  And if fame isn’t enough, there are prizes too! First place will receive a Timbuk2 bag, and 2nd and 3rd place winners will be awarded a Songbird T-shirt.

Please upload all entries to our Songbird Demo YouTube Group. Your video should not exceed 5 minutes and should excite me or teach me something new. All entries must be uploaded to the group by October 30th, 2009 and the winners will be announced in the November 5th Birdbath. Good Luck!

We closed the story book on a set of bugs that we know have been causing some of you pain today. You were instrumental in helping us to discover issues and in offering suggestions to refine our music management processes. These fixes will land in our Kanye release which you can look for in October. If you want to check it out early you can always grab a nightly.

Peanuts and Podcasts

The spinner has been pointing to Thai, so today we obeyed. Is there anything better than peanut sauce? I think not. Totally trivial factoid: Mike and I discovered that while we both love peanut sauce we’re not fans of peanut butter. In-ter-e-s-ting. Just think, if we still had that webcam set up, this is the type of stimulating information you could gorge yourselves on the daily.  In all seriousness, apparently we did have a webcam set up at one point and we see there is some interest in a weekly podcast. I’m a bit camera shy myself, but I agree it could have a big impact, especially once we’re equipped to play video podcasts. That’s where we plan to focus our energy for now, but who knows what the future may hold.