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!

We were feeling so good about being done with the release that we had the actual final build done and were probably headed towards the beer fridge. “Good times,” we said to one another, “Let’s congratulate ourselves for doing such awesome work to finish this release, which is definitely completely done. Phew! It feels great to finish things!” We then collectively failed to knock on wood, despite having an abundance of it in our office, and here we are today.

“Yo, um, that’s not a very funny story,” you say. Upon rereading it, we concede that it actually is not at all funny.

You may be asking yourself, “What on earth could have possibly happened that would take so long to fix?” Well, we basically had to rewrite how the entire application looks for and reads files off the filesystem. Our existing methods for reading files were not playing nicely with our new device synchronization behavior in one certain instance on Mac which ended up being very important. Nerds, you may want to check out bug 24478 and its friend bugs for the gross details, patches, reviews, hand-wringing, soggy kleenexes, and broken dreams that this bug caused.

So. Here we are. We have a build for you. We’re calling it a beta because we had to make so many invasive changes, but we hope that it ends up being our final 1.10 build. We were so completely sure we were done with 1.10.0 that we had to bump our version numbers up to 1.10.1, so don’t freak out that you missed a 1.10.0 release. There wasn’t one! *sob*

The beta downloads are available on our nightly downloads page for Windows, Mac, and yes, Linux. We will be pushing Mac and Windows updates for those of you who have the 1.10.0b3 version installed on your machines. If you find something grody, please log a bug!

We couldn’t help ourselves after 1.5. We had to make some more performance and memory usage improvements for you! We’re very excited about the progress we’re making and we hope you are as well. As with every release there are also many other bug fixes which we hope you’ll appreciate.

Not to sound like a broken record but we’re always happy to get your feedback so please don’t stop giving it.

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the availability of our latest Songbird for Android release!

For this release we have focused entirely on memory usage and speed with impressive results. We hope you’re as happy with it as we are.

As always, your feedback is welcome and appreciated! We couldn’t have built such a great product without your input.

It’s time for another Songbird for Android release! New in this release is support for Podcasts.

Podcasts will now show up in their own view. Also, when listening to Podcasts, we’ll automatically bookmark the last position and restore it when you start listening to it again later.

As always there’s a slew of bug fixes and improvements for you to enjoy.

Here’s where you can find the Podcasts view in the app home screen.