Mike M's dashboard

Mike M replied on November 18, 2009 02:36 to the problem "Switching between main and mini player causes crashes" in Songbird:

For specific questions/reports about nightlies, I believe you would be better off reporting in one of the developer areas like Bugzilla, IRC, or the developer mailing list. getsatisfaction is more of a community support site.

Mike M replied on November 18, 2009 01:57 to the problem "Songbird placing tracks in random order, ignoring track number" in Songbird:

Hmm, never seen this problem before. It seems like it has to be caused by inconsistent metadata. If you look for the album in the filter pane, does it happen to show up more than once? If so, there is probably a subtle difference in the artist, album, or album artist tag. You may as well also check the year and disc number tags. What I would do is batch edit the files of each album and resave all of those fields at once to ensure that the data is consistent (no extra spaces or punctuation or anything). Hope that helps, it's the only idea I have...

A comment on the idea "WASAPI output" in Songbird:

Hmm...I did actually test for that but I don't really have a wide variety of music formats on my computer and didn't test it extensively. Could you let me know the characteristics of the file and any gstreamer errors that showed up in the error console? – Mike M, on November 15, 2009 21:30

A comment on the problem "LyricMaster lyrics not showing up on iTunes" in Songbird:

The problem is the Songbird breaks the ID3v2 specifications by writing an invalid language code for the lyrics. iTunes then ignores the lyrics because of the invalid language code. Mp3tag (a separate program; use the link in raycosm's post) can be used to correct the language code so that it conforms with the ID3v2 specification. – Mike M, on November 14, 2009 20:54

Mike M replied on November 12, 2009 00:10 to the problem "Songbird removes embedded album art" in Songbird:

I'm not sure that this is the problem, but Songbird only saves tags as ID3v2.4, which isn't supported by all software or devices (e.g. Windows explorer, WMP). Try using Mp3tag to see if the album art is actually still present. It can also be used to convert tags back to ID3v2.3 if that is what you need.

A comment on the idea "WASAPI output" in Songbird:

I think I see the problem. There were some new WASAPI restrictions and error codes added in the Win7 RC that I didn't fully implement. I will try to fix it today and post a new version tonight. Also, in the future it would be better to post problems like this on the addon page to keep the getsatisfaction thread from getting too cluttered. (Another logon, I know, sorry...) – Mike M, on November 11, 2009 18:00

A comment on the idea "WASAPI output" in Songbird:

I finally got my own computer back and cleaned this up a little bit more. I made an extension out of it so it's easy to try now. I haven't extensively tested it, but I have let it play for hours in shuffle mode with no problems. The extension is here. – Mike M, on November 07, 2009 04:27

Mike M replied on November 07, 2009 03:35 to the problem "Songbird changes Windows 7 Theme" in Songbird:

This issue is addressed in the First Aid section of the Songbird Wiki. It is probably caused by an incompatibility between Quicktime and your video drivers. Try updating those two things, or enable safe mode in the Quicktime control panel.

Mike M replied on November 07, 2009 01:29 to the question "how to build vendor-binaries by Visual Studio 9" in Songbird:

What have you tried? It's been a while since I've done this but I think the main gotcha of using VS9 is that you have to define the environment variable SB_DISABLE_COMPILER_ENVIRONMENT_CHECKS because Songbird only officially supports VS8.

Mike M replied on November 04, 2009 04:55 to the question "incorrect artwork displayed" in Songbird:

Play with the album art settings in the about:config page. Make sure songbird.albumart.file.enabled is set to true and songbird.albumart.file.priority is not negative. Lower priority is better (except negative) so you may have to change the value of songbird.albumart.metadata.priority to get the desired effect.

The good news is that in Songbird 1.4 there will be a nice, easy-to-use preference page for these settings.

Mike M replied on November 01, 2009 20:53 to the question "Windows 7 'snap' functionality?" in Songbird:

You may have noticed that Songbird doesn't have a standard window border. This is the reason that the Windows 7 'snap' functionality and other functions such as aero peek don't work with it. There are some Songbird themes that bring back the standard window border (eliminating this problem), but I don't think any of them have been updated for Songbird 1.2 or later. I imagine that they will be updated as more people start using Windows 7 and running in to this problem. Some examples are System, More Native, and Aerofirebird.

Mike M replied on October 30, 2009 23:02 to the question "Actively support portable songbird to sell installed on portable media players" in Songbird:

Is this really a question?

I think it's good idea. It will require some work, such as adjusting paths to match the assigned drive letter, but could be well worth it.

BTW, my idea of a good portable app is one that has read-only access to the registry, read only access to the user's files, full access to the tmp folder, and full file-chooser access.

Mike M replied on October 30, 2009 22:53 to the idea "Songbird should actively search for missing codecs during imports" in Songbird:

Hmm...I don't think this is practical. It's easy enough to support all common audio codecs. (The extensions in your mockup are not codecs.) Users who choose not to use common formats already know that they have to look for special software that is compatible.

For video codecs, many are under patent in some countries and POTI will probably run into legal issues if it provides them even as extensions or plugins (e.g. H264, the standard and best available video codec). So the best they can do is provide a link where users can get them for themselves. This is all WMP does anyway.

I think Songbird should only try to support all practical (i.e. free) common formats. I do think it should scan files it imports and let you know if it thinks it can't play them.

Mike M replied on October 30, 2009 01:40 to the question "DirectX 11 Video Transcoding" in Songbird:

I'm almost certain the answer is no. Why? Because DirectX 11 isn't available for WinXP, Mac, or Linux which account for the majority of Songbird users. Rather, Songbird will probably make use of the transcoding abilities of its gstreamer media core. There's really not much support for DirectX at all in gstreamer so I can't see support for DirectX 11 specific stuff coming anytime soon.

Mike M replied on October 24, 2009 22:10 to the idea "Having a way to sort out songs missing album art would be great" in Songbird:

This has been suggested/discussed here. A method to kind of do what you want is in the third comment.

A comment on the problem "Grabbing album artwork with Songbird erases some file metadata in Windows 7" in Songbird:

No, there's currently no way to do this. I believe it is a limitation of the tag library Songbird uses. – Mike M, on October 24, 2009 20:29

Mike M replied on October 24, 2009 17:50 to the problem "Grabbing album artwork with Songbird erases some file metadata in Windows 7" in Songbird:

This is caused by Songbird writing ID3v2.4 tags into the files when you update the artwork. Windows explorer & media player don't fully support this. If you want it fixed you will have to get Microsoft to do it. If you just want to make your files work, you can use a tool like Mp3tag to rewrite the tags as ID3v2.3, which Windows can read.

Mike M replied on October 18, 2009 14:17 to the question "Building Gstreamer + Codecs?" in Songbird:

For Windows, Songbird is built using the Mozilla Build System which provides an MSYS environment and uses Microsoft's compiler. Instructions for building Songbird are located in the Songbird Developer Center of the Songbird wiki.

Building the Songbird dependencies (including gstreamer) is more complicated. General instructions and few more required tools are here. If you follow these instructions you should be able to build the gstreamer core and parts of the plugin packages. You won't really need all the SDKs -- it depends on which packages you're going to build.

Good luck with your endeavor.

Mike M replied on October 06, 2009 03:29 to the question "songbird reorganized my music and left out some albums" in Songbird:

If I edit the tags in Songbird, do the tags on the actual files get rewritten, or does it only apply to Songbird?

In general the tags on the actual files get rewritten, but there are specific file types and ways of adding tags for which this is not true.

Any idea how I can fix the problem of Songbird refusing to import my media with missing tags?

It should still import them; I don't know why it wouldn't. Are you sure you're not just having trouble finding them because they aren't tagged? Try clicking on "Library" at the top left and then sort by album. Songs without an album tag should be at the very bottom of the list (or very top if it was already sorted by album).

Mike M replied on October 05, 2009 07:19 to the question "songbird reorganized my music and left out some albums" in Songbird:

Songbird organizes its library based on the metadata (tags) contained in the files. It sounds like your collection has inconsistent or missing tags. I would use Songbird (or preferably a better tag-managing app, but I don't have any recommendations for a Mac) to clean up the tags in your music. For more information on how to edit tags in Songbird look here.

In your case you could probably just fill the tags based on the filenames and directory structure. I believe the Tagger addon will let you do this easily.