Songbrid 1.1 beta2!!

Time to rock the web even harder! Songbird 1.1 beta 2 is out with some pretty cool new features, like Watch Folders and Album Art Scanning!
Check out the blog at: http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2009/02/25/songbird-11-beta-2-is-available-for-testing/

and if your not ready to test betas you can grab 1.0 at http://getsongbird.com

Songbird RC1 for 1.0!

That is right we have released Release Candidate 1 for Songbird version 1.0 and it is looking pretty hot!

Slashdot,  Ars Technica, Songbird

A lot of people are still complaining that Songbird is bloated and uses to much memory. I am not sure what kind of drugs these people are on but with the same libraries my Songbird runs at the same amount of ram as iTunes, and gives you so much more! It sits around the same or less memory as Firefox, Thunderbird, Mail, etc. People expect applications to run in like 8-10 megs which is totally unreasonable now a days, the applications need to do more and there for need to be bigger.

And yes we are a bit buggy, lacking some features etc, but remember we are just reaching 1.0 and in only 2 years, iTunes is at version 8, and Windows Media player is version 11. The last several versions of each of those has had very little new features added to it. We will be adding tons of new features at a very quick pace and other people will be able to add features through the plug ins.

Before people jump on software or companies they should really look at the full product, and what it is capable of. If they don’t then they are just denying themselves the opportunity to possibly use a great program. I wonder how many of these people complain about Windows on a daily basis, but still use it every day as well . Time for them to grow up and get with the reality of software.

Rock the web! Songbird.

My Songbird Look

Here is what my songbird player looks like today:

New Album Art manager

Here is a preview of what the new album art manager is going to look like:

Komodo 5!

Woot! The alpha for Komodo Edit 5 is out and looks great! Get it here.
They are now on the 1.9 base and it looks pretty nice!

Adding year to the filter pane.

So I like to be able to filter by year as well as genre, artist and album. This is very easy to add with a simple change to a preference.

1. Open a new tab and enter “about:config” in the address bar.
2. In the Filter type “songbird.library.filterset”
3. Double click this entry and you can now add the year property. “http://songbirdnest.com/data/1.0#year;”

Add this to any position you want, they will appear in the order they are in here.

Mime Service problem on Album Art

Apparently the nsIMIMEService doesn’t work as I expected. I use it to determine the extension for the artwork file we create when reading the meta data image from a media file. Using the following code you should be able to get the extension from valid mime types:
// grab the extension from the mimetype
var mimeService = Cc["@mozilla.org/mime;1"]
.getService(Ci.nsIMIMEService);
var mimeInfo = mimeService.getFromTypeAndExtension(aMimeType, “”);
if (mimeInfo.getFileExtensions().hasMore()) {
ext = mimeInfo.primaryExtension;
}

Using a mime type of “image/jpg” however does not seem to return a valid extension? So we are going to do a small work around that will parse the aMimeType to try and get an extension out of it if the nsIMIMEService fails. And of course we are going to check that we get only valid image extensions (no exe or bat ones please).