Mike Smith's dashboard

Mike Smith replied on September 21, 2009 17:17 to the idea "Create GStreamer Codec's Website" in Songbird:

We put extensive work into making sure GStreamer works well with each release of Songbird.

If instead GStreamer was a separate system-wide thing that we had no control over, we wouldn't be able to fix bugs as they came up.

This isn't a practical answer at all.

Instead, we encourage our community to build additional GStreamer plugins, and create addons to install them - then users can simply download and install the addon.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on September 14, 2009 17:24 to the question "Why does ID3 metadata not show up?" in Songbird:

Hi David. This can happen sometimes - usually it means there's something a bit weird/unusual about your tags. If you file a bug report at http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/ and attach one of the files that has this problem, we can look into it.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on June 22, 2009 17:22 to the problem "No Album Art in Songbird 1.2 on Ubuntu 9.04" in Songbird:

Corey - sorry, reading album art from m4a files isn't supported in songbird 1.2. We've actually already added this functionality, so it'll be in 1.3. Hope you don't mind waiting!

Mike Smith replied on June 18, 2009 16:57 to the question "Album Name Has Been Truncated?" in Songbird:

Hi jtrain. In mp3 files, the tags are represented using a format called "ID3". There are two versions of ID3, version 1 and version 2. Version 1 has a length limit on the fields of 30 characters - so that's why your album is being truncated.
Version 2 doesn't have this limit, but probably your files don't have version 2 tags. Or possibly they do, but songbird can't read them for some reason.

Do any other programs successfully read the whole album name? If they do, then it could be a bug in songbird - if that's the case, then could you send one of the files to me at msmith@songbirdnest.com ? Include a link to this post so I know which problem it's about.

Mike Smith replied on June 18, 2009 16:52 to the problem "media core error could not determine type of stream." in Songbird:

Hi dtay - that doesn't sound too good. We'll need to see the actual files that are having trouble though, to be able to fix it - could you please send me one of them, to msmith@songbirdnest.com?

If you can include a link to your post here in your email (so that I know which problem report it's linked to), that'd help too.

Thanks,

Mike

Mike Smith replied on June 04, 2009 16:54 to the question "Windows WavPack Support" in Songbird:

Sunraycer: no, still no current plans for us to support wavpack.

Mike Smith replied on June 01, 2009 17:25 to the question "Does SongBird support Winamp encoded HE-AAC files?" in Songbird:

Unfortunately we don't support HE-AAC, only AAC-LC (by using Quicktime's AAC-LC decoder). To support HE-AAC, we'd have to pay a licensing fee for every copy of songbird downloaded - so we don't.

Maybe in the future!

Mike Smith replied on May 26, 2009 18:33 to the problem "error getting video width or height from caps (mediacore error)" in Songbird:

Thanks Ronald.

Unfortunately, this turns out to not be a normal mp3 file at all (despite the .mp3 file extension). Instead, it's an MPEG Program Stream file - these are usually only used for video, and we don't support them.

Hopefully we'll be able to support this sort of file in the future, though.

Mike Smith replied on May 26, 2009 18:14 to the question "Songbird 1.12 on Ubuntu 9.04 does not play Lossless AAC" in Songbird:

Unfortunately there are lots of problems with - legally - supporting various media formats. On some platforms (like OSX), the system comes with an ALAC decoder that we can legally use - but on others, like linux, that's not the case. Sorry!

Mike Smith replied on May 26, 2009 17:26 to the question "Songbird 1.12 on Ubuntu 9.04 does not play Lossless AAC" in Songbird:

Hi kedmond.

There's no such thing as "lossless AAC". Maybe you have ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec" files? Unfortunately, we're unable to support those on linux.

Mike Smith replied on May 26, 2009 17:25 to the problem "error getting video width or height from caps (mediacore error)" in Songbird:

Hi Ronald - that sounds pretty annoying!

You're the first person to ever report this - and from the error, I think it's due to the specific files you have.

Could you send me one of the files that has this problem, so I can look into it and hopefully fix it? Email it to msmith@songbirdnest.com

Mike Smith replied on May 04, 2009 23:26 to the question "GStreamer TCP plugin available?" in Songbird:

I don't quite get why you object to HTTP - there's no problem with doing it that way. And then it'd be reasonably standard, and you wouldn't have to worry about which client you used.

There is no way to make songbird use vlc.

Mike Smith replied on May 04, 2009 18:05 to the question "GStreamer TCP plugin available?" in Songbird:

Andrew,

This might be the thing you're looking for: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Develope...

We indeed do not include the tcp plugin. However, you _probably_ don't want to use the tcp plugin for what you want to do - you really need to run a server (e.g. an http server) then stream over that protocol, and the tcp plugin won't do that for you.

Mike Smith replied on April 27, 2009 21:43 to the problem "wrong playback speed" in Songbird:

Most likely this is a bug in your sound drivers - not a hardware fault in the sound card, and not a bug in songbird.

Can you play these 24 bit flac files with other linux applications properly? e.g. totem, or rhythmbox?

Mike Smith replied on April 22, 2009 17:35 to the question "Songbird 1.1.2 fails to load gstreamer plugins in Jaunty" in Songbird:

Hi Nick.

Songbird doesn't include WMA support on linux - we can't include it due to legal issues. However, if you have system gstreamer plugins to support WMA, it'll use those, and WMA playback will work - that's why it worked for you in intrepid.

Unfortunately, now that you've updated, you've got gstreamer plugins that are too new for the version of gstreamer that songbird uses - so songbird fails to load them with the errors you gave there. We're updating to a newer gstreamer in the next release of songbird (1.2), so hopefully that'll help you. In the mean time, there's not really anything simple for you to do.

Mike Smith replied on April 21, 2009 17:23 to the question "No sound on Build 1059" in Songbird:

Hi Nick. We know about this problem already, and it should be fixed later this week. Thanks for letting us know.

The problem is actually that the volume is set to 0 at the start - if you adjust the volume it'll work right.

Mike Smith replied on April 15, 2009 17:39 to the question "Songbird apparently won't play m4a files encoded with a certain codec" in Songbird:

Hi viviena. This sounds like a real bug - I'd like to fix it, but I can't do that without having a file with this problem. So, could you email me one of the files that doesn't work (and remind me in the email what the problem is), at msmith@songbirdnest.com - and I'll try and fix it for the next release.

Alternatively, you can upload it to some website, and just send me a URL.

Mike Smith replied on April 15, 2009 17:38 to the question "I have no video on MPG files." in Songbird:

Songbird doesn't currently play video. As Andrew pointed out, you can enable it - but that won't help with mpeg video, because we don't include an mpeg video decoder (we'd have to pay very expensive licensing fees to do that...).

Mike Smith replied on January 20, 2009 17:48 to the problem "Problems with Ogg-Vorbis and Flac-files" in Songbird:

Bambule: Vorbis and FLAC should play fine. What OS are you using?

Songbird does support ID3v2.4 tags in UTF-8, but neither flac nor vorbis use ID3.

Mike Smith replied on January 16, 2009 20:07 to the problem "Wrong file path to application data due to wrong character encoding" in Songbird:

Joergenr: Yeah, I know. This is this bug: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

I'll try to have a fix in for the next release, but no guarantees.