Slate8's dashboard

I have Mythbuntu 64 bit with the XFCE windowing system. I'll try installing Songbird 0.7 from the same location when I get a moment and let you know if it works for me.

Have a go at this: right click a file in the Songbird library you suspect contains lyrics. From the menu choose "Edit Metadata". You should see the comments tag towards the bottom of the window that opens.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad to help out where I can :) – Slate8, on October 22, 2008 21:11

I think songbird searches the comment tags as well as the usual ones. Are your lyrics in the comments? I find this useful for mix mp3s etc with the tracklisting in the comments but I guess it could be used for anything really.

If you are on Mythbuntu, are you using XFCE or Gnome? Also, what version of songbird is it?

Sounds a bit like an issue I had when forcing the sound prefs to use ALSA. Check out my issue and resolution here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

Maybe it's a question of how much memory usage you are willing to tolerate. The two main apps I use all day have a similar memory footprint, so if songbird uses the same amount I don't see this as an issue. Added a screenshot for fun...

I have 15,048 songs and the latest nightly of songbird is only using 160Mb of RAM. What version are you guys using? I would say < 200Mb is acceptable, Firefox regularly uses more.

From what I remember 0.7.0 was extremely memory hungry. This seems to have been resolved in recent builds.

This works very well for me:

http://pidgin-lastfm.naturalnet.de/ti...

It sets your status based on the last track you scrobbled to last.fm

There are debian packages that will give you the application menu link etc available from http://www.getdeb.net/app/Songbird

Hope this helps... :)

Hey Boris,

Thanks for spending time on this. I'm happy to report that I've got things working as they should be (audio from everything).

Back when I installed Hardy a few months ago I didn't know about libflashsupport. In order to get audio from flash 9 when Rythmbox was running I forced my system to use ALSA through the "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound" settings. Obviously this wasn't ideal.

I have recently upgraded to flash 10 for which Adobe have even supplied a .deb package. I then set all my audio preferences back to "Autodetect" and songbird, flash, mplayer, rhythmbox etc can all play audio simultaneously. I guess flash 10 does not need libflashsupport and has actually been coded a little better this time.

Thanks again for your help in getting this resolved for me!

Not sure about the deb vs current version on getsongbird.com but the latest nighties are much better on memory. The media scan is still pretty vicious, but after that, for general playback etc, I was getting about 150Mb average; less than FireFox! Yay!

Thanks for your reply Boris. I agree that audio on Linux is a bit of a mess! From a clean install of Ubuntu with default settings all audio apps seem to want exclusive access to my soundcard. This frustrated me for some time until I discovered that if you go into "System" -> "Preferences" -> "Sound" and set all the playback devices to ALSA, it solves the problem.

Once this is done all applications can play audio simultaneously, and until recently this included Songbird. As a test, before I wrote this I opened Rhythmbox, Youtube in Firefox, a .mov in Mplayer and the Last.FM app. I hit play in all four apps and got audio from everything. It sounded awful, but that's not the point :)

We said:
>"I start say rhythmbox then Songbird, Songbird has no audio."
>>Now we can blame Rhythmbox...
Can we really blame Rhythmbox if it works with all other apps?

If I download 0.7.0 form http://getsongbird.com/ I can play audio from both Songbird and Rhythmbox (or any other app) simultaneously. However, if I download one of the latest nighties I can not.

This is a bit of an issue going forwards. Little things like the official last.fm scrobbling support addon (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/...) will not work. Songbird grabs the audio first, then starts the official last.fm player which moans about not being able to find an audio device.

Or if I am listening to music in Songbird and someone sends me a Youtube link, I have to close songbird to view the video in FireFox.

You said
>"If I exit Songbird and do the same with Rhythmbox and YouTube, I get the same problem - only one of those will play. "
I would be interested to see if you get the same results after adjusting your audio settings to ALSA as I mentioned above?

Would love to get this sorted...

Great idea, would love this.

Thanks for the tip - have added myself to the CC list :) – Slate8, on August 30, 2008 14:00