By Aus 
Feb 29, 2008 4:56 pm
One of the big features we’ll be releasing as part of Songbird 0.5 is MTP device support.
MTP, or Media Transfer Protocol, is used by many types of devices these days. It ends up being pretty awesome because it enables device manufacturers to create devices that can all have the same great user experience when interacting with the contents and managing it from Songbird! Sweet.
Initial support for MTP devices includes manually managing the contents of your device, managing playlists and transferring media files to/from your device.
So far we’ve gotten Sansa, Creative, Nokia and HTC devices to work within Songbird. Awesome.
I’d also like to mention the names of all of the engineers that worked on this feature, without their dedication, none of this would’ve been possible. So, without further adieu, here is your MTP device team: Aus, David, Erik, Keisuke, Mark and Steven!
Tell us what you think! 
You can try it out by getting the latest nightly and add-on here.
Aus
P.S. If you are a device manufacturer and you would like Songbird to support your MTP device, do get in touch with us.
By ben 
Feb 4, 2007 12:09 pm
The next version of Songbird (0.2.5) will support Apple FairPlay and Windows Media DRM audio playback. Those features are already enabled in the latest nightly build and everyone is encouraged to give those builds a spin. If you’re on Windows you’ll need to have a new-ish version of Windows Media Player (probably 9 or newer) for protected WMA playback and QuickTime for Windows (probably 7 or newer) for FairPlay to work. On OS X you’ll only get FairPlay playback, sorry.
How does this work? We don’t hack out the encryption keys or anything illegal. Songbird supports multiple playback cores so we simply use Apple’s and Microsoft’s own playback engines to do the decoding for us. We use VLC for playback of most file types, but now whenever you play a protected WMA or M4P file we swap in the Windows Media Player or QuickTime core. Sounds easy, right?
Well, no. Not really. The world of DRM is a little (cough) unfriendly, so I figured that I should share some of the war stories and a few tricks for anyone interested in making DRM playback work in their own apps.
It seems both Apple and Microsoft are a little paranoid when it comes to debuggers. I fault Apple a little more than Microsoft in this case for reasons I’ll hit in a second. But be forewarned: using DRM software under a debugger may not work correctly (or at all), and documentation may be totally misleading. What happens? Well…
By jkoshi 
Dec 4, 2006 4:14 pm
Our bird blue prints are coming together quickly now. It’s been my job to make Songbird’s user experiences easy and integrated. Now that our proof-of-concept has gotten us this far, we are free to make a few necessary changes to our visual and behavioral user experiences.
We are also addressing a number of accesibility issues that our proof-of-concept elicited from our early “fans.” That said, I’ve been doing competitive-analysis and necessary research to determine how we should make Songbird design decisions.
By roblord 
Jun 27, 2006 1:41 am
Eager birdbuilders, you may now build the bird.
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!
