Download Songbird 1.0 rc1

Songbird is fast maturing as the first release candidate of version 1.0 was released yesterday. Songbird is an open source and cross platform media player made by Poti, short for ‘Pioneers of the Inevitable’. This group of developers was previously involved with Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine. The main change in this release is that Gstreamer is now used for media playback. This should deliver better performance and reliability and, in the future, more functionality. The full changelog of this release looks like this:

Improved Audio/Playback Functionality

• We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms – giving us higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.
• Songbird supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA on Windows; and AAC on Windows and Mac.

UI Experience Improvements

• Many new keyboard shortcuts added. The list of those supported per platform can be viewed via “Keyboard Shortcuts” selection in the Help menu.
• We’ve refined the column heading property list and made it easier to enable the properties you care about. Just right click on any column heading in a library or playlist to give it a try.
• “Show File” now available for any selected track via File menu or right click on track contextual menu. This provides an easy way to find the media file location on your filesystem.
• Smart Playlists can now be used as rules within other Smart Playlists.
• Ability to show/hide display panes via individual buttons for service pane, bottom and right sidebar display panes

Performance Improvements

• Faster Media Importing
• Drastically Faster Search
• Reduced Startup Times
• Snappier Sorting
• Efficient Scrolling of Large Libraries
• Reduced Memory Usage (When importing and using large libraries)

Stability

• Many miscellaneous top crashers were fixed for this release.

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