We’ve fielded a request or 12 for Songbird integration with FoxyTunes, but we were pretty stoked to learn that they’ve had a request or two as well. Yesterday they announced that they can now support Songbird. In just a few simple steps you can control Songbird from FoxyTunes in Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux! Sometimes getting beat to the punch doesn’t suck. Woot!

Crossing the border

We’re super excited that Stevo and his family are bidding a fond farewell to Canada so he can begin working with us locally. The San Francisco office is thrilled to have you here. What do you want for lunch next week? You can have your choice as long as it’s not burgers, we had that today, or pizza, Kreeger had that for dinner last night. Otherwise, anything you want!

Goodbye Canada Day, Hello 4th of July

To celebrate the arrival of Stevo (and our independence) we thought we’d turn off the internets for a long weekend. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Enjoy the fireworks but hold the fires!

While we wait for bug fixes and feature requests to roll in we’ve documented your findings and indicated how to prevent issues or repair the damage in our Importing & Managing Your Music page. Thanks to Michael Purses for his efforts so all of your suffering was not in vain. Also a huge thank you to Andrew Luecke who effectively diagnosed and triaged many of your reports on Get Satisfaction over the weekend. These guys are two outstanding members of a phenomenal community.

Speaking of our network of super duper peeps, it looks like there’s a new ideator in the house. What? Ideator is totally a word…

TheParadox2 has been collaborating with longtime songbird ideator, Murphy on an awesome idea: the awesomest awesome bar! Even more exciting for you add-on developers looking for your next project, atrieu has some pointers for getting the awesomeness under way.

What’s more awesome than an awesome bar? How about a pimped out pony? Ali called for glitter and streamers and GeekShadow and atrieu delivered. So sparkly.

Amidst the crunch of pushing Isan out of the nest last week, we all took a long lunch and walked the 2 blocks to beautiful AT&T Park where we enjoyed an afternoon outside, hot dogs, peanuts, garlic fries and most importantly, beer. The Giants lost, but it still beat the lunches we’d been eating at our desks up until then.

Songbird 1.2 focuses on improving library management and provides full integration with iTunes, in case you want to live in both worlds. We continue to listen to your feedback on Get Satisfaction, our blog and Bugzilla. Please let us know what’s important to you.

New Features

Automatically Organize Library Files
Songbird can now automatically organize the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customize the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.

2-way Sync with iTunes
If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

Last.fm Radio
Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.

10-band Equalizer
Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve continued to make the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Mainly:

• Faster search
• Deleting many tracks at once is faster
• Selecting a large amount of tracks from the library is no longer slow
• Reduced the amount of threads required to be running at all times by 50%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix some of the most common crashes in Songbird.

What’s Next

Our goal is to continue to focus on building a world-class, open music player. Our next release will consist of continued focus on performance and stability gains, implementing additional audio features, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment below and file bugs and/or feature requests in Bugzilla.

In short: we heard you. We knew you wanted a pony an equalizer. We were just super-duper busy. Our product ambitions nearly drowned out your desperate pleas. Aus never forgot you guys, though. Even though there wasn’t room for it on the product schedule, and he had to do the whole thing on the weekends and during late nights, he wanted to make sure that you got your pony equalizer.

Next time you nudge those low frequency sliders up on your pony equalizer to enjoy some bangin’ booty bass, remember that it was Aus who made it possible. (Also, major shout out to awesome community member Franco, who did a lot of the groundwork for us!)

Now then.  You’ve seen your pony equalizer, and you like it, but… some of you now want a glittery mane equalizer presets, jeweled hooves more bars to slide, a pink saddle with hearts stored settings on a per-track basis… and we hear that too.

But here’s the thing: the pony is in the code base now. It is YOUR pony.

You, the community, can collaborate to improve and enhance the pony.  Our Developer Center contains lots of links to help you get started.  We have a Google Group where you can meet and collaborate.  Let Community Manager Extraordinaire Laura help you use the wiki to plan and track your projects just like we do.

Project Pimp My Pony. Is anyone interested? Grab your tail brush, some pretty silver streamers, and your best glitter.  Let’s see some fairy princess rainbows equalizer presets happen.

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in this Beta and get your feedback on:

• 2-way Sync with iTunes
  If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

The Beta 2 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before the final release.

Back to the birdbath

Sorry this bird skipped her bath last week. We were locked in our cage chasing all the bugs you found after we announced our 1.2 Beta 1 release.  Speaking of beta releases, 1.2 Beta 2 just got built so test it while it’s hot!

Ever wonder where we get some of our half baked ideas? Well from the Idea Kitchen, of course. SteveL whipped up this page to pull in all the top Get Satisfaction ideas to make it easier for us to see what you all want at a glance and for you to easily pick and choose where you want to focus your votes. You’ll recognize right off the bat that some of the biggest vote getters are so very close to completion and some of the other favorites are scheduled for upcoming releases.  One of my favorite things about this page is the way SteveL coded it to display the last linked bug in each thread so you can quickly hop in to your favorite feature requests to vote in Bugzilla or add your name to the cc list to watch the play by play as work on the bug unfolds. Some of the birds around here already have their beaks to the grindstone working hard on Jackson 5 so you may see some activity on some of your favorites soon.

Parlez-vous français? If so, you need to check out Frenchbirds, a community created blog maintained by our French community, for our French community. It features news about Songbird, add-on reviews and they even plan to add in tutorials along the lines of our Getting Started pages, all in the language of love. A special thanks to GeekShadow for getting the French blog off the ground and keeping it in the air.

I know you look forward to our menu as much as we do, so you’ll be sad to hear there’s no birdseed at the aviary today. Our weekly meeting was rescheduled so our bird bellies are empty.  Poot.

I have two week’s of hot Get Satisfaction topics this week…did I mention I missed you?

So let’s start with the good news, cuz well, sometimes a bird just needs to strut her stuff. Some seriously great love has been coming our way in the midst of the 1.2 release but the kudos for open sourcing the iPod add-on struck a special chord cuz it just feels good to do what’s right and get a nod for it.

The sharing library feature request is not exactly a new hot topic, in fact it’s had a nice following for several months now, but Wayne has made some very thoughtful replies that have sparked new interest in the conversation.

And just for fun, take a moment to hop in and write some bird related doom for The Book of Mozilla.

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in this Beta and get your feedback on:

• Automatically Organize Library Files:
  Songbird can now automatically organize the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customize the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.
• 10-band Equalizer
  Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.
• Last.fm Radio:
  Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.

The Beta 1 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before the final release.

In Bird-Build land, Preed has been working hard (with help from SteveL and Tyler, our Intrepid Technology (IT) Dude) to bring the Buildbot status pages back.

Sez Preed: “They’ve been unavailable to the community for too long, especially for a project like ours: open source and valuing transparency. We had to take them down for good [technical] reasons (related to Buildbot’s architecture and some required network changes), but it’s a change all of us cringed as we made it. We started working immediately to come up with a solution.”

Well, they’re finally here! You can see pages for all of our builds by hitting: http://buildbot.songbirdnest.com/

That page has a list of buildbot waterfall pages, including integration builds and nightlies.

Great idea seeks talented developer and presto, a sweet new media view is born! Designed by JohnM and conceived by Murphy in this Get Satisfaction thread, this add-on is already getting some community love.  It’s pretty cool to see community conceived ideas turn into reality so quickly.

We took a quick break to Hi-5 Red Five for getting cast in an off Broadway Market production of The Producers but really it was short and sweet as everyone is working hard to get a blessed build out tomorrow.

In case you didn’t catch it in last week’s comments there are some bangin’ new Add-ons to check out. Do it.

You can tell it’s release time because Get Satisfaction is jumping with all of your great ideas and good bug finds. With nearly 5,000 topics we can’t always reply to each of you as we would like, but we have a great community of Champions and Official Reps who help to pick up where we leave off. If you’re interested in joining the ranks to help us whittle away at some of our unanswered topics, let me know and I’ll help get you started.

Reporting live from the Fish Bowl…

Isan Release Checklist

Preed cut a branch and we posted a release checklist that we like to call, “Ruin Preed’s Life” and if that weren’t enough he’s predicting a buildbot outage all afternoon. Poor Preed. Luckily he has new jeans that he told us to tell him make his ass look great, so if you show him some love we think he’ll be OK…til next week that is.

Murphy posted an inventive idea that, if implemented, would be a cool and simple way to help all of us non-programmers customize our media view. Nice looking out Murphy! This may not look like a hot Get Satisfaction topic yet, but I hope it turns into one soon and rallies enough support to get adopted.

For lunch we had a gallon of peanut sauce with a straw and a touch of Thai food on the side. Menu suggestions for next week welcome!

We were so stoked about the response to our Getting Started with Songbird pages and even more stoked by our phenomenal community that instantly set to work on translating the pages. Less than one week later there is already a Dutch translation published, with a German translation underway. I get so warm and fuzzy when we all work together.