Bapabooiee's dashboard

As a (former) user of Windows Media Player, and the Zune media player software, I've taken quite a lot of time to properly rate all the songs in my library just the way I like.

Windows Media Player and Zune both allow you to store a song's rating in its song database, or internally inside an mp3's metadata. I use (and have always used) the latter method, and it is a great way to keep the ratings on all the mp3s in my massive collection consistent. So as software and operating systems come and go, the ratings for all of my songs are always there, always the same - and I don't have to worry about backing-up the database files for whatever media player software I happen to be using.

What I'm proposing is for the ability to import said rating metadata used by WMP and Zune from the mp3 file, and then have it be used by Songbird's own library (I think the name of that metadata was "wmp_rating", or something very similar).

Right now, all the ratings for my mp3 collection on Songbird is blank, and I'm not willing to go and re-rate everything. I think offering this feature to people who are migrating their mp3 collection to Songbird would make that migration easier.

What do you think?

I've got a few things to share here, regarding the library/search/playlist functionality of Songbird, as well as a couple possible bugs. I have quite a bit to say here, and I feel it's best to post all of my thoughts here.

LIBRARY-related Feedback :

1) I don't like how when you've selected music from your library, switch to a playlist, then decide to go back to your library, Songbird completely forgets where you were in your library. When I accidentally click on a playlist, or curious about something, I always find myself having to find the current song/album all over again in the library =[

2) When I do a search of my library, and say, switch to a playlist, and go back to my Library again, Songbird forgets what I was searching for. The search term is still in the Search box, but it isn't filtered. I have to hit enter to do the exact same search I expected to remember when I go back to the Library.

3) I always somehow find myself accidentally "de-maximizing" my Songbird window. This is most likely caused because when the window is fully maximized, and try to hit a toolbar item, moving your mouse to the very top of the window doesn't activate the toolbar item, but acts as if you're clicking a blank section of the top-most part of the Songbird window (run-on sentence =P). It will also be noted that double-clicking a blank section of the top of Songbird (or any Windows app) will cause it to mini/maximize.

4) There's text above the song's progress bar/UI controls, that's listed like this:
"[song_name] - [artist] - [album]"
It's be really neat if you could click the artist or album text, and it'd take you to the respective artist/album in your library. But like I said, Songbird has trouble remember where I want to be in my library, so that'd be neat. Just a Do Want, not a Do Need.

5) There doesn't seem to be a place to find a "now playing" section for your music (probably because Songbird doesn't really work that way *shrugs*). Again, since Songbird always forgets where I want to be in my Library, it'd be nice to know exactly what songs it's playing... Or maybe, the years of Windows Media Player have messed me up. Eh, it'd just be a nice feature, though. Oh, and when listening to an album, and switching to another album just to look around in your library, after the song ends, it'll switch your album. So I always have to be planted in the same place in my library, or else my songs/albums will switch to something I don't want to =[

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And some Playlist-related feedback :

1) When playing songs from a Playlist, I don't like how when a song isn't reflected as playing in your Library - only your playlist. It should be more stream-lined than that.Which (again) brings me to my next point.

2) While this one isn't exactly a problem, I think it should be something possibly considered: When you add a song to a Playlist, there should be a setting (or maybe not even one) to add a song to a playlist, and start playing the playlist at the same time. This'd be nice, you wouldn't have to restart your music just to play the playlist. And when making a playlist, you'd like to sample music as well. So, when you want to find new music to listen to in your Library, it'd kick you out of the playlist... which isn't very nice.

3) Better Smart Playlist arithmetic!

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BUGS (maybe) :

1) Sometimes, for some reason, when Songbird switches to a new song, or jumps from playing in a playlist to your library (or vice-versa), and I decide I don't wanna listen to the song, Songbird still adds +1 for my play_count for the song. I know Songbird already does this when you listen to large chunk of a song before switching tracks, but I don't think it should count when you only play a song for 3 seconds.

2) For reasons I haven't quite pin-pointed yet, sometimes Songbird refuses to tell me which song it's currently playing in its Library. When a song is playing, it's denoted by a small speaker next to it, and I don't see that anywhere sometimes, when I know the exact song that's playing in my Library.

3) This is a pretty odd one, that I don't really understand. There's a few select songs in my Library, which when added to my Library, Songbird can't seem to get some meta_data/information from the .mp3 file.

There was this one song which could play just fine in Songbird, but when viewed in the library the (song) time field was blank (it didn't even say "0:00".. it was just blank), and the genre was set to "Other". There were about 4 songs in that album that were like this, while all the others had the correct information. It shall be noted that when inspecting the song's metadata, they differed from the others. The metadata was pretty much the same from all the others, but it had no "album artist", the CD number fields were blank, and the second field in the "Track Number" was blank (as opposed to having the total number of tracks from the album). All the songs that behave like this have similar traits in my Library.

I fixed the metadata (gave the proper Album Artist, Genre, and other misc. metadata is it generally matched the others songs in the album), then deleted the songs from my library, and re-added them. Same deal. The song could still play properly, but in the Library, the "time" field was still blank.

Windows Media Player can player can figure out the time (song length) of each of those songs in my library, and displays everything properly. I fixed the problem songs in Songbird's library by downloading the same songs from a different source. There's only about 20 songs in my (2000+ song) library. I don't understand why this is, but if WMP has no problem with those songs, Songbird shouldn't. I'll see if I can get some screenshots later.

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Alright, gentlemen. That's all the feedback I can think of right now. I understand this is just a place to share your thoughts, not for long-winded walls of text like above. But I wanna make my feedback as available as possible. I want to help make Songbird better =] I'll all be posting bugs/feature requests on Bugzilla. I'd appreciate if I could be directed to any other place my feedback could be more effective.

LessThan_Three you guyz. Congratulations for having a damn solid piece of software, for only a 1.0 release. Songbird - the first piece of software to finally dethrone Windows Media Player.

Here's to Songbird, the FireFox of Internet browsers... except it's a music player =]