Songbird 1.0.0 is now available

[rickcr42]

Is and has been a favorite of mine for a couple of years now even though it lacks "essential" audiophile features but the strange thing is my music sounds better using this player !

Yes the "new and improved" has pretty much pissed me off by changing the default "Feather" (songbird's name for skins) because to be honest it was the look and feel that first drew me in (use the pretty woman analogy if you want ) and it was a good fit on my old eyes and yes the "new" task bar icon change ALSO pisses me off (I had to click properties then change icon just to SEE WTF the icon represented !) but straight out of the SPDIF connection of my soundcard (optical and/or coax) this baby plays music on a par with my other player consisting of MediaMonkey as the Juke box using WinAmp 5.2 (5.3 sucked so i stopped updating there )/Otochan ASIO exe./ASIO4ALL asio driver to USB port (that or my hearing so sucks I can no longer tell the difference ;D ).

The plugins are great (Mashtape and ShOUTcast radio are must haves ),support/updates nice plus is my all time favorite SHOUTcast front end.

Now if i can only get back the "old" skin and tray icon all will be as it should be in the world and if not I will be a tad miffed but not so badly that I will have the inclination to gun it from my computer in favor of something else

check it out here

getsongbird.com/

[rickcr42]

digging deeper,and about time it is too dammit ;D

the "engine" is a thing called GStreamer

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GStreamer

gstreamer.freedesktop.org/

gstreamer.freedesktop.org/apps/

a cross platform code that will play (in Songbirds version anyway) :

MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac.

Is it perfect ?

HELL NO it is not ! I would love to see a method to bypass kmixer implemented but that just for comparing since obviously it is not an etched in stone requirement for good sounding computer audio,at least not to my soon to be 53 years old ears and having done an hour ago shootout between the free version of J-river,Media Monkey,Winamp and Foobar I could easily live with this for all my streaming audio because for whatever reason it just flat out plays music on MY system aand to MY taste buds (earbuds ? )




Features:

Media Importing-Add media to Songbird by importing from your file system or iTunes.
Media Playback-Songbird supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
GStreamer-Songbird now uses GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms.
Smart Playlists-Create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set.
Web Browser-Songbird includes an integrated web browser with features like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and more.
Cross Platform-Songbird runs on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Multi-language Support-Over 25 completed, community-contributed localizations and growing!
Automatic Updates-Always stay up to date using Songbird's built-in automatic updates.
Setup Assistant-Quickly setup Songbird for the first time.
Custom UI-Make Songbird your own by choosing from dozens of different skins feathers.
Library Management-Browse, organize, sort and search your media.
Developer Support-Songbird is getting better everyday thanks to its open platform and growing developer community.


In Beta:

Device Support-Songbird's device support is limited. The Device Support wiki has additional details about what's supported. Apple iPhones, iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune devices are not yet supported.
Metadata Management-Songbird supports reading from and writing metadata to many music file formats. We still need to support the ability to fetch additional metadata from popular lookup services.
Album Artwork-Display the currently playing track's album art and write new artwork back to the file. We still need to support album art fetching.
Subscriptions-Subscribe to music blogs and download music directly to your library. We're working on ways to improve this feature.
Performance & Stability-Improving the performance and stability of Songbird is an ongoing focus. Each release we set aside dedicated cycles to ensure we're making progress.

Coming Soon:

CD Rip-CD Rip and encoding are forthcoming. Check the roadmap for details.
Watch Folders-Automatically importing media from defined folders is coming soon. Check the roadmap for details.
Video-We're still nailing the music player experience, but can't wait to properly integrate video! Check the roadmap for details.

wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap

wiki.songbirdnest.com/Docs/Device_Support

[rickcr42]

OK.I must be retarded because this suggests there IS USB support in Windows or I am misreading "USB device support on Linux and Mac" from this page :

wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap/Feature_Requests

Support for Linux and Mac but no MS says to me it is already there but damned if I can find it