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Songbird already does this! Is there something not getting saved that you expect to?

Heyo,

you can already drag and drop tracks into a medialist from your OS. Is that what you're looking for?

Hi c0y0te,

Songbird doesn't do this yet, but it's penciled in for our next release. It's a big, tough feature to perfect. It has potentially huge implications for performance and needs to work across all kinds of weird situations on all our supported platforms and on all kinds of devices -- external drives, network drives, removable media of all kinds, and probably other things too.

We're hoping to nail it in the next release (codename Hendrix, not 1.0 which comes out really soon), so keep your eyes peeled.

Hi DHenson,

no, I think most of our performance and stability problems stem more from other places than media playback. From what I can see, CUDA looks to be an nVidia technology that is mostly useful for doing on-GPU executing development. Our new media core, based on gstreamer, would be the best potential application of that, but I'm not aware of anyone working in that direction.

Thanks for the suggestion though! Maybe in the future. :)

That is the coolest bug I've seen in a long time! Perfect screenshot.

So, first things first, it could be something wonky in one of your addons. Try making a new profile (no need to delete your old one) by starting Songbird with the command line and adding -ProfileManager. Then you can make a second profile for testing on. Do that, and let me know if it is still wonky!

If it is wonky, we can try to figure out what in your system is different from ours, and if it's not wonky, we can try to figure out what's gone crazy in your profile.

Hey Shane-o,

I don't think the Equalizer is scheduled for the next release, probably the one after that in April. There may be an add-on before then, but that depends on whether I (or someone else) gets time to hack on it.

Having said that, I think per-genre equalizer settings sounds like a good idea but is probably too finnicky to integrate in the core. (Where we have to worry about things like localization and trying to cover all genres and all that good stuff.) Of course it would be a really easy add-on to write if you weren't worried about all that other stuff (once there's an equalizer) and I hope someone gives it a go.

hi Grivers,

I'm hoping to do that in the next release. We would have put it into this one, but it came up too late in the development cycle to squeeze in. For now, the best work-around is to find the file you want to delete, right click it and say "Show File".

Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi Dominik,

the short answer is that someone needs to design and implement an equalizer interface, test it across all platforms, and then roll that into a release. Given that we are still finishing up integrating GStreamer on Windows and Mac, that's not going to happen in the release that's coming out soon.

On the plus side, with GStreamer available on all platforms, it should be possible for a community member to implement something as an addon. I can't promise any particular release date for any feature, but as Koshi mentioned, it is on our roadmap and we're going to get to it as soon as we can.

Play count and ratings are stored in the database, but unlike other metadata changes they are not stored in the media files on your disk. When creating a new profile, a new database is created. You may be able to rescue the database file from your old profile, but keep in mind that whatever your problem with the old profile was may have come from a corruption in that file.

So, to try a recovery, create a new profile, navigate to your old profile directory, and copy the "$oldprofiledir/db/main@songbirdnest.com.db" file in there to your new profile directory. This may introduce some subtle problems in your new profile such as files imported from media devices or web page playlists not recognizing their origin file, but should hopefully let you recover your play counts.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes.

Oy, that's not good! It looks like someone else has had the same problem here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

I'm not sure quite what's going on, but if you can provide the steps it takes to reliably recreate the problem, it would really help us to find and fix it.

Correct. One of Songbird's goals is to help open the media web and let developers easily distribute their music through their own sites.

Well, there are a few things in play here. First, yes, CPU and memory usage are high compared to minimalist players, and we're constantly working to bring them down. Unfortunately, adding new features adds new costs too, so it's a difficult curve to stay ahead on.

Second, if your collection was recently added, you are probably seeing the Album Art scanner running in the background looking for album art tracks within your MP3 files. It runs quietly in the background, but makes occasional queries to the database and to the filesystem. Of course, there are many other possible explanations, like, for example, Javascript open on a page in a background tab, or an add-on you've installed doing something (downloading Concert data, for example), but assuming a vanilla Songbird, this is the most likely explanation.

If you are really interested in tracking it down and filing it as a bug, we can investigate this in more detail and identify exactly what the problem is.

How big is huge? What is your expectation?

Hi CozaMcCoza, you don't even need an add-on to do this yourself. You can set an internal preference to disable extension version checking. Because I'm usually working on a development version, I always run with this option enabled. Here's the Mozilla page on the subject. It should be just the same in Songbird.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions....

Let me know if that doesn't clear things up for you.

(Of course, ashughes is right, and the "Nightly Tester Tools" extension has that feature built-in, too.)

There seems to be some good ideas in here, but I'm having trouble interpreting them. Can you expand on them a bit?

First, the scroll track list when shuffling issue. It is annoying as all get-out if your display changes while you're, for example, editing a field, or looking through your list of songs, or things like that. So, yes, that kind of problem is why we don't move the display when the track changes. Maybe with better specification it could be done, but we decided it would be less confusing this way.

Of course, it would suck if there were no way to find the current track, so we added one! Click on the name of the track in the faceplate and the playlist will scroll to the track in its current place in the playlist you're listening to. This could probably be made more obvious.

Second, shuffle. Random is random. That means sometimes you're going to hear the same artist twice in short succession. We use a pretty darn good random number generator, and we make sure that we actually sort your whole playlist randomly so you won't here the same song twice until the whole playlist repeats. To use an analogy from dice, the original Winamp style random shuffle would just roll the dice each time. Our new system rolls the dice and re-rolls any time it sees a number it's already seen. (It doesn't actually work that way in the code, but the result is the same.) What you're suggesting is along the lines of rolling the dice and then making some decisions about whether or not the number is too close to another random number we've rolled recently.

This is not to say that there couldn't be a "better" way of doing random shuffle. We just haven't got the time or the resources to put into doing design or engineering on something like that when we have so many other more important things to work on. Still, if someone from the community is interested in working on it, we'll gladly help however we can.

Hi TechiMi,

SoundCheck or Replay Gain, it's more nerdy-named successor, would be a great feature for Songbird. At the moment, we're focusing on some other features, but we're hoping that with gstreamer as our full-time audio core it should be quite possible for someone in the community to create a simple add-on which would make this happen.

Love the discussion. We've had lots of similar thoughts internally and talk about doing many of these things. Please, keep up the conversation! Try to keep in mind that powerful, but simple features are most likely to make it into the application in some form, someday. Also, I'd be very happy to help any addon developer interested in prototyping some of these things.

Woah, really? Could you post a screen shot?