Songbird, the desktop music player powered at its core by Mozilla technology, has recently released a new version: Songbird 0.7 (RC). This release offers several new features for the player, including Last.fm support and a refreshed UI. For music lovers, this new version is definitely worth a look.
This year, we've seen Songbird add features and several new extensions to their product. In January, we told you about Songbird's 6-week campaign to build the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions for Songbird. Today, the majority of those extensions have been completed and are available for download from this page. You'll recognize some of your favorite extensions on that list like del.icio.us (SimpleDelicious), Chatzilla, DownloadThemAll, Faviconize Tab, FasterFox, Shareaholic, and StumbleUpon.
In March, Songbird released version 0.5 which included MTP Device Support for Windows users, a new Device API, and a feature called "Media Views," which let developers create alternate ways to display your music library via extensions. (example: Artist Detail List).
This most recent release, Songbird 0.7, offers a brand-new UI with a more refined look-and-feel, a new setup assistant, smart playlists (like iTunes has), a concert calendar that lets you find upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your library, and Last.fm support, which lets you scrobble the tracks you play and love them or ban them.
Additionally, they've added GStreamer support for all platforms, making GStreamer their new media core. By default it handles all FLAC playback on Windows/Mac and you can enable GStreamer to handle more codecs. They've also speed up media scanning and reduced memory usage on Windows/Linux.
When we last mentioned Songbird here on RWW, we were surprised by some of the comments. "Too little, too late," said one commenter. We hope those who have written Songbird off because of their slow development cycle will now take another look.
The new setup assistant, for example, makes getting Songbird up-and-running quickly. It offers to import your iTunes library for you and pre-checks recommended add-ons for you to try:
Songbird's new UI is also a major improvement - that's mainly because now it looks more like iTunes than ever before. However, in many ways it's better than iTunes - there's tabbed browsing across the top, favorite bookmarks like The Hype Machine on the left, and the Last.fm support adds a social element to your desktop player experience.
The Songbird team plans to have Songbird 1.0 ready by December of this year, and we're looking forward to all to checking out all the incremental improvements along the way. If you want to give Songbird a shot, you can download it from here.
UPDATE: To clarify, Songbird 0.7 is a RELEASE CANDIDATE, not the final version of 0.7.
Comments
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Great news. Just played a little with this new version. It's working fine but one thing great I'd like to see added in the v1.0 is the partnership with Vuze.
Posted by: Romain | August 4, 2008 7:13 AM
I installed the 0.7 release candidate version yesterday and I have been nothing but impressed with it.
Whilst the media player/web browser has been criticised before because of its similarity to iTunes, it is trying to shake that criticism by moving interface elements around in a logical fashion. I particularly like the playhead at the bottom of the interface especially when browsing the web whilst listening to music.
The Last.fm plugin that integrates the social network's capabilities with the player is truely awesome; being able to ban and love tracks from within the playhead window is much easier than opening up the standalone Last.fm app.
I cannot wait until version 1.0 is released to refine some of the flaws expected in a release candidate.
Posted by: Scott Mallinson | August 4, 2008 7:37 AM
I will give it another try, but in general i do not really feel comfortable with these play list centric apps. An album centric app with last.fm capabilities is basically all i need.
Posted by: eelcoh | August 4, 2008 9:01 AM
By the way, the data for the concert feature in Songbird is provided by Songkick. They've been fantastic to work with, so wanted to make sure they received proper acknowledgment. :)
Ethan (from Songbird)
Posted by: Ethan Bauman | August 4, 2008 10:24 AM
I downloaded a previous version, but I couldn't skip songs with the arrow keys or pause/play with the space bar. Fixed?
Posted by: piers | August 4, 2008 6:52 PM
super ctrl+v
http://www.jimmahdigital.com/2008/08/05/songbird-07-huge-improvements/
Posted by: About | August 6, 2008 4:34 AM
FYI, 0.7 final is now available:
http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2008/08/20/songbird-beta-is-released/
Posted by: Chris Messina
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August 21, 2008 11:56 AM