pvh's dashboard

That's a good idea! I'll suggest it to SteveL. – pvh, on November 26, 2008 22:42

You may be running a too-old version. 1.0 will be out on Tuesday, if you can hang on till then, your problems should be solved. If you're in a rush, grab RC3 from the website and use that, it's almost identical to 1.0 except for a couple of bug fixes. – pvh, on November 26, 2008 22:42

I'm afraid I don't know too much about this. Maybe one of our localization gurus will notice this thread and chime in with their wisdom.

Yeah, it's actually surprisingly tough supporting all those various iPods in all their various configurations. You're talking to a guy who used to run Rockbox on his Archos Jukebox way back in the day, so clearly I'm on the same page as you.

We're an open project. The best way to get things fixed is to show that people care and to file bugs, both of which you're already doing. I guess the other important thing is to get other people who care to chime in too. You get a whole bunch of other Songbird/Rockbox users chiming in and asking for fixes, I think you'd see a lot more action.

I think we're more likely to make an addon which pulls that data from the web directly, but of course, we welcome patches. Anyone out there feel like making a contribution?

Well, I keep writing 'em, but it turns out I have a job to do so they tend to languish a bit. I have released three now -- I just released the first pass at Vertical Filter panes, and there's the Metrics view for stats nerds and bubbles, which is a bit of senseless eye candy. MattC has done two, but I think he only released the tag cloud and not the light-boxed album art one he did. I keep bugging him to clean that up and get it out there, but he's just so busy he's hard to pin down. Anyway... if you have ideas, make 'em happen. Really, they're pretty easy to make even with just JS/web design skills.

Getting Songbird into Ubuntu isn't really a simple process. It's held up by all kinds of technical work that needs to be done that doesn't really drive Songbird forward. Of course, we want to do it (I'm going to be awfully happy the day I can "apt-get songbird" on my Mom's Ubuntu machine) but it's going to take time to figure out the details.

There's a much longer thread about this at:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

As for iTunes Album Art, we've looked into it, and it's possible, but it isn't easy and you never know when Apple will pull the rug out from under you by changing their file format. Maybe some time soon? We'd love a community contribution if anyone is up to it.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I think you'll find that most of the features you describe as bloat are in fact add-ons. Last.FM support, Concerts, MashTape -- I think that covers everything you mentioned. Don't like Last.FM? You can choose not to install the add-on at first-run. Of course, we think some of the addons are pretty kick-ass (particularly a few of the ones we build ourselves, can you blame us?) so they get offered to you at install time to make sure everyone has the chance to try them out.

As for the stability issue, yep, it's the most important thing to us. We're all working hard to nail down the top crashes, to smooth out the UE bugs, and to make every little piece of the app shine. If you find things we missed... let us know, and we'll put it on the list of things to fix.

No, neither of those things are implemented in Songbird. We decided having the library scroll to the current track would be really confusing if you were trying to drag and drop things, edit tracks, change your selection, or that kind of thing. You can click on the currently playing track in the face-plate to jump there.

What Ubuntu keyboard shortcuts do you mean? If you're talking about media keys, it should be a very simple add-on, but nobody has got around to it yet on Linux as far as I know.

FYI: Scrubz is somewhat broken at the moment. Maybe Georges will have some time to hack on it after the release is out?

Man, I wish I was smoking whatever you are! I'm with Wayne -- no way, no how.

Of course, you can always make your own add-on but if you do... man.

Scary.

Fixed in 1.0! Try the latest Release Candidate, or wait a little bit and the final version will be ready.

In recent builds you can enable the metadata rescan option in the right-click menu by going to the url about:config and changing "songbird.commands.enableRescanItem" to true. We've also had reports of Songbird not wanting to read metadata from read-only network shares, which may be related. HTH.

I have no idea! Theoretically, the Firefox dictionaries will work with Songbird. It might take a bit of hacking, but it should be possible.

yeah, i don't think anyone internally has ever tested songbird + ipod/rockbox. file some bugs in bugzilla. we've got some guys going to be working in that area soon, so there's a chance they'll be fixed. of course, having said that, rockbox isn't likely to receive official support any time soon (much as we loves it).

still, with guys like you out there working on it, there's some hope for you! make a bugzilla account and file *good* *detailed* bugs with easy to reproduce steps. since we don't have a rockboxed ipod at the office, testing is basically impossible for us, so there's only so much we can do.

as for ogg syncing, i betcha the addon is assuming you have a non-rockboxed ipod which doesn't support oggs and is politely not syncing them. that may be relatively easy to fix. again -- file a bug! (http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/)

Laura, this is a "libre" issue, rather than a "gratis" issue. I don't believe heminder is concerned about cost, but about having some of his freedoms taken away.

Heminder, let me explain in more detail. I suspect the specific legal definition of "Songbird Add-Ons" within the scope of that document is something to look more closely at. It may need updating, but Legal Text isn't really my thing. I know that almost all of our internally developed add-ons which are licensed under the GPL. The two exceptions I am aware of provide MTP and iPod support, so unless you need device support in Songbird, I don't believe you'll ever encounter any non-GPL code. Of course, having said that, the license of third-party add-ons uploaded to our site is entirely the business of the add-on developer.

As to why we have closed source addons at all, that's not really something I'm super informed about. Personally, I am on the side of opening everything, but as a developer with an open-source bias, I am somewhat biased. My understanding is that at one point there were important business reasons for keeping that part of our source closed Still, we listen to you guys, and we'll keep talking about it at the 'nest.

Anyway, thanks for caring enough to post your message, and I hope that answers your questions. Feel free to ask for more follow-up, and if I don't know the answers, I'll try to drag in someone like SteveL, Ethan, or Rob who know more about this stuff than I do.

Okay, here's a simple example of how to extend the web scraper using a patch. This is really just the beginning, but it should be able to get you started.

Index: app/content/scripts/webscraper/webScraper.js
===================================================================
--- app/content/scripts/webscraper/webScraper.js (revision 11825)
+++ app/content/scripts/webscraper/webScraper.js (working copy)
@@ -62,6 +62,7 @@
let steps = [
WebScraperSteps.DocumentURLSource,
WebScraperSteps.CancelScrape,
+ WebScraperSteps.Wrzuta,
WebScraperSteps.MediaURL,
WebScraperSteps.Hacks_DropBadUrls,
WebScraperSteps.DupeCheck,
Index: app/content/scripts/webscraper/scraperSteps.js
===================================================================
--- app/content/scripts/webscraper/scraperSteps.js (revision 11825)
+++ app/content/scripts/webscraper/scraperSteps.js (working copy)
@@ -180,10 +180,31 @@
mediaURLSchemes.indexOf(url.scheme) != -1) {
pipeline.send(properties);
}
+ else if (properties["isMediaURLOverride"]) {
+ delete properties["isMediaURLOverride"];
+ pipeline.send(properties);
+ }
}
},
-
+
/*
+ * Wrzuta
+ * Rewrite Wrzuta.pl urls.
+ */
+ Wrzuta: function ScraperStep_Wrzuta(scraper, node, pipeline) {
+ var properties;
+ while((properties = yield properties)) {
+ var cu = properties[SBProperties.contentURL];
+ if (cu.indexOf("wrzuta.pl") != -1
+ && cu.indexOf("/audio/") != -1) {
+ properties[SBProperties.contentURL] = cu.replace("/audio/", "/aud/file/");
+ properties["isMediaURLOverride"] = true;
+ }
+ pipeline.send(properties);
+ }
+ },
+
+ /*
* Hacks_DropBadUrls
* A step used to store hacks which work around common false positives.
*/

Heyo, this is now implemented as a power-users feature. To activate it open your "about:config" and change the key "songbird.commands.enableRescanItem" to true. Presto voila! You're in business.

Enjoy!

Hi guys,

just thought I'd check in. I think you'll find that memory usage is much improved in 1.0. There's will always be room for improvement, but we've made huge strides during the last couple of months and I think everyone who chimed in here will be able to appreciate the difference.

Also, HarmonicStyle, while there are still some rough edges, we're (gradually) working towards supporting 100,000 tracks in a Songbird library. At this point, I'd certainly feel very comfortable running Songbird 1.0 with 10,000 tracks or even substantially more. For those who try, the major slowness I'm aware of right now occurs when you try to delete thousands of tracks at once. I suspect you could probably create some Smart Playlists which would be pretty darn slow with that many tracks too.

NK, importing your music will probably annihilate your machine.

I usually test with a 100,000 dummy-file library on my laptop, but I have four gigs of RAM. Importing 116k files brings me up to about 800mb of RAM peak. After that, you can restart the application and it should hover around 200mb. Performance for most actions is pretty good with massive libraries, but there are a few things to avoid that I am aware of, specifically: deleting a large number of tracks simultaneously or attempting to select your whole library.

We have a special category of bugs in our Bugzilla which are prefixed with [100k] which I use to track performance issues for collections of that size. Obviously with that many tracks you understand that there is a limit to how much performance we can bring, but I would love to hear your experiences using that much music in Songbird on a day-to-day basis (I mostly just do testing with a library of that size, not actual use.) Please feel free to either use GetSatisfaction to report issues you find with massive-library performance, and we'll do what we can with the time we have to make it work.

Good luck, and keep us posted.