Songbird 0.2 Developer Preview
Release Notes 2006.10.18
Hello friends! We managed to get the 0.2 release completed! Believe us, we know it took way longer than it should have. Now that we've managed to get the worst of the crossplatform hurdles behind us, we're ready to rip the guts out again and press onward toward a new set of milestones.
And it's good to point out here that there's still a long series of milestones ahead of us. The roadmap is going to change, we're going to shrink our development cycle, and we're putting together the game plan to make progress happen much more quickly around here. We're going to be heading toward 0.3 next, but don't be surprised if you hear us talking about "0.4-0.6" around here, soon.
Features
Still, it's important to look back and see how much further we've come since 0.1.1b, and there's plenty of new features all across the board. It was a long cycle, but we did a bunch of stuff. To summarize so you don't have to go back and read the 0.2-RC1 Release Notes and the not-yet-0.2 Release Notes:
- Cross platform compatibility
- Windows 2000, XP
- Using VLC
- Mac OS X (PPC, Intel)
- Using Quicktime
- Linux (Intel)
- Using GStreamer
- 50+ Languages
- Windows 2000, XP
- User Features
- Slightly-Less-Cheezy Video Window.
- New Miniplayer, slim and sexy.
- Collapsable Splitters for a totally customizable Songbird UI.
- Easy access to web media in the Web Playlist.
- Subscribe (like a podcast) to mp3 blogs.
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Global Hotkeys
- Media keyboard support
- Ctrl-J Jump To Window to control your playback.
- Ctrl-E Metadata Editor.
- More and better search engines
- Updated welcome page
- User bookmarks (add and delete)
- Sortable, resizable, and reconfigurable playlist columns
- Blazing media import speed!
- Improved remote metadata reading.
- More metadata formats (.m4a & .ogg)
- Extension support (with Extensions!)
- Automagic Updates!
Issues
At the same time, there are still plenty of unresolved issues with the current build.
I hate to sound like a broken record, and I know I keep saying this, but seriously: this release is not meant to replace your current media player. We don't currently have a competitive feature set, and we don't think we're better than anybody. Yet. Seriously. It's a long haul to 1.0, but the more we grow the faster things will start to happen.
And we love all our testers and early adopters for putting up with us while we've been hammering this monster into submission. Without you all, this build would have been far worse than it actually is. So we owe it to everyone who reads this to be honest about what major pieces are still likely to upset you:
- Major Bugs
- All Platforms
- First off, we DID fix the nasty CPU bug that cropped up in RC3 (Bug 1767, Bug 1772, Bug 1775). Especially under Windows, things should be much much better (you must uninstall and install the final, however, as updating from RC3 won't fix it).
- However, we're still not scalable to huge libraries yet (Bug 652), and we'll always eat a bunch of CPU when performing major actions like scanning for media or metadata -- that's why they're so much faster, now.
- And we're still using browser technology that hasn't been retooled for being a media player, so if you use us to look at lots of webpages (especially ones with flash), we'll use more CPU and Memory than you'd normally expect a media player to use (Bug 8 Bug 123 Bug 227 Bug 1487).
- There's still plenty of metadata scanning bugs, including remote .m4a files (Bug 968), local and remote windows media (Bug 1137 Bug 1120), remote id3v1 (Bug 953), and local and remote id3v2.4 (Bug 1347).
- Lots of the browser-oriented preferences in our preferences dialog don't work properly (Bug 699 Bug 1724).
- We can't properly detect media urls in a webpage with frames (Bug 743).
- Track metadata with certain punctuation characters won't work for filtering or searching (Bug 1064).
- Windows
- VLC playback on Windows will sometimes sound choppy on slower machines when performing other CPU intensive activities. The fix for this (see CPU above) was worse than this bug (Bug 714).
- VLC won't play files with unicode characters in the path (Bug 684), or remote urls with spaces (Bug 1677).
- VLC also won't play remote .m4a files or AAC shoutcast streams (Bug 1655), it displays funny for .flac and headerless VBR .mp3 (Bug 886 Bug 1761), it can't play DRM windows media (Bug 862), and sometimes it will just crash (Bug 1431 Bug 1523).
- On Windows, you can't install the app as one user (like Administrator) and then use it as a different user (like Guest). If you do, the audio won't play. Makes no difference what users you switch between, there's a specific VLC file that gets written to the current user's Documents & Settings upon install and you have to copy it around if you want to work on other logged in users (Bug 1595).
- Mac OS X
- Linux
- All Platforms
- Things We Know Aren't Written Yet
- But we'll someday get done...
- Tabbed Browsing
- CD Playback, Rip, Burn
- Crossfading ("Gapless Playback")
- Normalization ("Replay Gain")
- Equalization
- Visualization
- Device Support
- XSPF Playlist Support
- Better Smart Playlists
- Subscription (podcast) Aggregation
- Changing the UI to anything else ("Bones")
- Lan/Internet Library Sharing (UPnP/Bonjour/Etc)
- Writing metadata edits back to the media files
- But we'll someday get done...
