Songbird 1.0 RC1 now available

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source

Songbird 1.0 RC1 now available

by Brad Linder Nov 5th 2008

Open source, Mozilla-based media player Songbird is inching closer to version 1.0. This week the team behind the cross-platform application made the first release candidate of Songbird 1.0 available.

So what's new in the latest build? First up, Songbird 1.0 RC1 uses GStreamer to handle media playback whether you're running the Windows, Mac, or Linux version of the program. The Songbird team says that should mean better performance and reliability. The latest build also includes a number of performance enhancements, including the ability to import media into Songbird more than twice as fast as before.

Here are a few of the other changes/improvements in Songbird 1.0 RC1:

Users can also drag and drop images to add album art to a song.
Addition of new keyboard shortcuts
Smart Playlists can be used as rules within other Smart Playlists
Improved search speed
Faster startup times
Scrolling large libraries is more efficient

While this is a release candidate, which means it's a bit more stable than your typical beta software, there are still a number of known bugs and issues. You can read the complete list in the release notes.

Tags: media-player, mozilla, music, songbird, songbird-1.0, songbird-1.9-rc1

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

edward said 7:26PM on 11-05-2008

Is there a list of bugs to be regressed and cross checked? I would love to do some work for them.

Steve said 11:00PM on 11-05-2008

No doubt, you want to check out the Songbird Nest Bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/

ogrul said 11:00PM on 11-05-2008

I think Songbird is a cool project, but there's no way I'll be using music player which eats 100-150mb of ram. Foobar eats only 5-10MB, and while MediaMonkey uses around 50MB it has tons of library maintaining and editing options.

squiggy said 11:00PM on 11-05-2008

Wow could they have possibly ripped off iTunes any more? I'll laugh when Apple sues them.

Stuart Halliday said 11:58AM on 12-03-2008

iTunes must be the worse Music Library UI I've ever seen on Windows.

So anything better is welcome.

I was totally amazed at how bad it was when the iPod itself is designed so much better. Apple's best kept secret?

Ernst said 10:03AM on 11-06-2008

Besides the ram eating it still lacks of a good equalizer, darn necesary for geeky music listeners like myself

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