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.

We’ve hit a snag in the Hendrix release — our 1.1b1 and 1.1b2 builds are causing crashes for some of you and we don’t know why.  We’re launching an all-talons-out bird assault on this thing to get it fixed before the final release.

Here’s how it’s going to go down and what we need from you:

If you’re seeing the crash, you’re probably on Windows Vista and it’s probably crashing soon after launching Songbird. We need your information!  Submit the crash report and please oh please add a comment about what was going on when it crashed. (If this doesn’t sound like your crash, we’re not ignoring you; we fixed two other new crashers on Friday and they should be gone now.  See bugs 15485 and 15502.)

Everyone (crashers and non-crashers alike), download the latest nightly off trunk and give it a spin.  We upgraded Songbird’s database in our trunk builds in hopes of fixing the crash.  If the community gives us the thumbs-up on the DB upgrade, we will merge those changes out to the Songbird1.1 branch for the Hendrix release.

Developers, if you feel like rolling up your sleeves and digging around in the bird innards for this one, you can find all pertinent crash reports here.  Development activity is being tracked in bug 15501.

Use this comments thread to communicate with us and with each other!  Did the trunk build fix the crash? Did it cause your machine to pop open and give birth to a fleet of unicorns? We want to know, so we’ll be checking in frequently over the weekend.

Happy weekend, everyone!  I’ll be announcing the winners of the Watch Folders community bug hunt next week!

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.

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…

Applications that use QuickTime APIs on OS X will appear to crash the *instant* a FairPlay track is loaded if the app has a debugger attached. Seriously. The entire app dies and prints “Program exited with code 055″ to the console. What, you don’t know what code 055 is? No one else seemed to, either, except for Google. I was led to an excellent blog post that helped me unravel this mystery. In a nutshell QuickTime aborts the app if it sees an attached debugger and prints that cryptic error message.

For an honest developer (me) trying to use Apple’s public API this is unacceptable. Killing the entire app is entirely unnecessary. Why not just make the load function fail? The QuickTime docs don’t mention this limitation as far as I have been able to find, and that is equally ridiculous. Try searching developer.apple.com for “quicktime 055″ and see how many hits you come up with. I’d even be happier if it printed a simple “Not allowed with an attached debugger” message. As it is I spent quite a bit of time examining my code for changes that could have caused a “crash” before admitting defeat and searching Google.

Fortunately there’s a really simple way around that mess. As detailed in the blog post above, the abort is triggered from the ptrace() function, so using gdb you can do an early return and keep your app alive. I added a gdb script to my machine that automatically skips ptrace() and I haven’t looked back. Except with bitterness.

Now, before I move on to Microsoft I should point out that once the debugging issue was solved I have been rather pleased with the way QuickTime works with protected content. It even works on Windows. The APIs are a little, uh, tough to get used to if you haven’t done much Carbon programming, but with enough time and patience I got an acceptable result (and I learned enough to know that I made some mistakes – I can’t wait to fix some of the code for 0.3).

Microsoft is just as paranoid about debuggers and DRM but they win the “developer friendly” award by a hair. Accessing protected WMA files with Windows Media Player seems just like opening any other file. Your app continues to run (amazing, no hard abort!) except that the file refuses to play under a debugger.

The play() function succeeds as it does for every other file, and let me tell you, it’s really frustrating to receive no error code when you know that something has obviously failed. I ended up adding a bunch of error logging code that examines the IWMPErrorItem associated with a media item and found that Windows Media Player was actually returning an error sometime after my play() call supposedly succeeded. This leads me to believe that play() does nothing more than add the internal play command to a queue somewhere (but good luck finding that in the documentation).

The error code returned was 0xC00D2767, and after a little searching I found that code was defined as NS_E_DRM_DEBUGGING_NOT_ALLOWED: “Running this process under a debugger while using DRM content is not allowed”. Of course I wasted several hours trying to figure out why play() was failing yet claiming success, so I was still royally upset when I realized I had been bitten by the same kind of “bug” that I had fought with QuickTime. But at least Microsoft was nice enough not to kill my app and to actually return an informative error code (albeit in a way that was difficult for me to figure out).

A week ago I had never used the Windows Media Player APIs, and I’m brand new to the QuickTime APIs as well. I’m sure a lot of my frustrations were just the normal headaches associated with learning new APIs. I’m also willing to bet that a bunch of the “bugs” I encountered were caused by me using those APIs incorrectly. I’m used to debugging XULRunner, and whenever I receive an error code I’m unfamiliar with or something fails for no reason I can go look at the code to figure out what’s going on. In contrast QuickTime and Windows Media Player are black boxes, and without good documentation it’s really tough to figure out what’s going on… Add DRM into the mix and the black box turns into a black hole.

Both Apple and Microsoft are trying to protect their DRM schemes (which isn’t a bad idea), but in doing so they’ve made it much more difficult to use their products. Maybe I would feel less bitter if they’d simply stamped a big red “WARNING” banner on their documentation.

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.

I’ve heard a lot of hype of about Windows Media Player 11 (WMP 11). CNET gave it quite the beaming review. While the editors (who may have liked the flavor of Kool-Aid that day) gave it a stunning 8 of 10, the average user, who didn’t get Kool-Aid, gave it a 6.2 of 10. I have to admit, the press made WMP 11′s new interface look pretty simple and useful.

As one who enjoys to learn his own lessons, I eagerly downloaded and installed WMP 11 and was immediately able to do everything I needed a media player to do. I also noticed that it did a wonderful number of other things to improve the visual browsing of a collection. If you like Windows Explorer, well you’re in luck. The WMP 11 team found all of their inspiration there, and you’ll be wonderfully amused at how they’ve shoe-horned a music-browser into a file-browser’s clothes. In any case, while these are certain to spawn innovations, I was also delighted to see other “innovations” in the basic parts of the interface.

Following in Apple’s design-sucking vacuum, WMP 11 sports Auto-Album art! After scanning my computer for media, WMP 11 provided me an album art view with pre-loaded album art. Take that iTunes!!! But upon closer inspection, I noticed that the album art wasn’t real!

I suppose when you’re so close to the finish, hooking up an album art provider just couldn’t make it to the beta list. And why should it, that’s such a webby thing to do, this is a media player, not a web browser!

I know this is a nit, but any serious music person—or anyone with enough attention span to notice—is also going to notice that the currently playing display is also befuddlingly simple. How do you take simple too far? Let WMP 11 show us the way:

Now I know you’re all post-rock fans, so it’s OBVIOUS what is displayed above. And out of three choices, Artist, Album or Song, you’ll be right even if you guess blindly about 33% of the time. I guess if I can learn a one lesson out of every three I’m taught, that’s not bad.

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!