Songbird is a media player for video and audio, which includes support for libraries, radio, podcast, devices and network services, music stores and search on the Internet. Songbird employs Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, and is thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. On the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Songbird utilizes the VideoLAN Client for media playback. Recently, the developers of Bird Song released version 1.0.0 RC1.

The big news in this version of Songbird is that GStreamer is now the main media playback system on all platforms (not just Linux, where it originated). GStreamer allows Songbird to have a cross platform code-base and, according the developers, offers better performance, better reliability, and more plugin options than alternative like QuickTime. You can read more about the reasoning behind Songbird’s decision to use GStreamer on the Songbird blog. 

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in RC1:

Audio Playback: We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system across all platforms – this means higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.
Album Art: The album artwork feature now supports drag and drop of images, as well as, the ability to toggle between displaying artwork for playing or selected tracks.
Keyboard Shortcuts: We’ve cleaned up our keyboard shortcuts this release (and added some new ones for power users). Look for the link to a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in the application’s Help menu.
Smart Playlists: By popular request we’ve implemented the ability to use a smart playlist as a rule within another smart playlist.
Performance Enhancements: We’ve improved many aspects of the application performance. Most notably, importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.

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Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 12:18 pm | by Kur-nia-one |