We’ve just put the discover (beta) feature out in today’s release.  Now you can have a look at all the bands that your friends are into, and connect with the ones that you like too.  Keep an eye on this part of the app, we’re adding some great new ways for you to connect to the artist that you love most, and find new ones too.

What’s New:

• Discover Menu (WiFi Optimized)
•  Follow your favorite artists
•  Discover who your friends are following
•  Comment on your friends music tastes
• Support for Videos

Your feedback, as always, is welcome. Anyone experiencing bugs is encouraged to contact us at android-support@songbirdnest.com

What’s New:

• Resolved Facebook like button instability
• Fix problem with podcasts with invalid metadata
• Various other bug fixes

Your feedback, as always, is welcome. Anyone experiencing bugs is encouraged to contact us at android-support@songbirdnest.com

1. Stability improvements
2. Enhanced SD card handling
3. Various bug fixes

What’s New:

• Improvement to podcast layout view
• Fixed duplicate playlist issue when synching with Songbird Desktop
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

Your feedback, as always, is welcome. Anyone experiencing bugs is encouraged to contact us at android-support@songbirdnest.com

The three issues we looked into were the sync of playlists to Android devices (and this related one), the WMA playback issue, and the Smart Playlist with the criteria of “Playlist is Library” that was causing a crash. These have now been verified as fixed, but please file a bug or post on GetSatisfaction if you find any other issues. (Be sure to check out the FAQ and Common Duplicates first, though!)

Some of the playlist sync issues are specific to Songbird for Android, and there is a fix coming for the duplication of playlists in the next release! They’re diligently working on fixes for the rest of the scenarios, and we hope to have them soon.

We’ve also added support for four Android devices : Google/Samsung Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy SII, HTC Evo 3D, and Galaxy Nexus. While we would like to add support for other devices as well, the technical info we need doesn’t seem to be easily available online. So we’re asking for your help! If you have an Android device, please head on over to GetSatisfaction for more info about how to help.

Thanks, and enjoy the update!

- Fixed unexpected playback bug
- Fixed playback control for in-car docking stations and the Atrix Media Dock
- Fixed  an issue where the Songbird lockscreen had to be be dismissed before you could answer a call
- Any track that has its genre tagged as “podcast” will appear separately from the music

Your feedback, as always, is welcome. Anyone experiencing bugs is encouraged to contact us at android-support@songbirdnest.com

Enjoy and Happy New Year!

- Audio now fades out and resumes automatically on incoming phone calls
- Added seek on long press of “next” and “previous” buttons to the app and lockscreen
- Added portrait orientation lock setting
- Additional protections against unexpected playback bug
- numerous other minor bug fixes and UI tweaks

Enjoy!

When I came to Songbird, I sat down with our investors, our partners, our employees and our new management team. I talked to people in the music and technology industries and explored many of the over 400 new digital music services that have debuted in the past several years.

After parsing through this enormous amount of input, our team concluded, as many of you probably have as well, that almost everything about the music industry is changing. Music and technology are rapidly innovating and new services are being introduced almost daily. It’s a significantly different world from the way things were when Songbird originally started. And it appears that changes aren’t destined to slow down any time soon. Here are some high-level trends that we distilled. We believe these should drive the focus of Songbird going forward:

• Increasingly, people are listening to music on connected devices (e.g. phones, tablets), not solely PCs
• People are warming up to the idea of using cloud-based services enabling access to their music anywhere (e.g. Google, Amazon, Apple and MP3Tunes)
• More people are subscribing to music streaming services (e.g. Pandora, Spotify, MOG and Rdio)
• Managing your music on the desktop is dominated by iTunes
• YouTube is one of the top locations younger people listen to music (57% according to Nielsen)
• Social music experiences are becoming more important especially as it relates to expressing music interests and understanding your friends’ interests.

The bottom line is that if Songbird continues to primarily focus on the desktop and the associated purchase-download-manage model, we will be increasingly out of sync with changing marketing conditions.

OK, so where should we fly next?

Well, we’ve spent the past few months creating a fundamentally new strategy for both the company and our products. We’re not ready to share all of the details yet, but I can certainly state that we are going to be working on smaller, more focused apps and directly targeting social music experiences for all of you – our “fans”.

We have a lot of ground to cover and we are trying to cover it as quickly as we can. Stay tuned to this blog. As we create the future of Songbird, we’ll be back at you with more news.

We turned our sights towards improving device support in this release. Our end goal was to break out of the old erase-and-sync model to create a compelling, intuitive two-way sync experience between your portable device and any number of desktop computers running Songbird. Existing Songbird users will notice there is no longer a distinction between “manually manage” and “automatically sync” — you can choose to use a one-button mechanism to sync playlists or your entire library if you wish, but that does not block you from dragging and dropping individual items between your device and your library, and vice versa.  You can now use your portable device to bring a song to your work computer that you downloaded from home, or even to load up something new and awesome from a friend’s laptop to take with you.

We’re excited to get this into everyone’s hands! Let us know how you end up using it.  :)

• no more unexpected playback happening when you get a notification!
• flickr photostream now more stable
• numerous other minor bugs

Enjoy!