Download Songbird 1.0 rc2

The second Songbird release candidate was released on Friday. Songbird is an open source and cross platform media player developed by Poti, which is short for ‘Pioneers of the Inevitable’. This group of developers was previously involved with Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine. The main change in version 1.0 is that Gstreamer is now used for media playback. This should deliver better performance and reliability and, in the future, more functionality. Below are the changes that stand out the most in the second release candidate:

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features in RC2:

• Importing iTunes libraries will no longer trigger a hang.
• Using the the Windows Media Playback and QuickTime Playback add-ons we’ve brought back the ability to play pre-authorized DRM media: WMA DRM on Windows; Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
• mashTape has been updated and will no longer invoke Flash player security warnings.
• We’ve adjusted the buffer size for streaming media but we’re still working on the final setting. If you think it’s too high you can adjust it by following these steps.
• Video support has been temporarily removed from the application. Our move to GStreamer introduced some new video related bugs that couldn’t be addressed in time for this release. Since video has been an unsupported feature we decided that this was the prudent thing to do for now. You can absolutely count on us re-introducing video support in a future release down the road!
• When viewing Album art at full size you can now easily close the window.
• When clicking on a track in the library invoking inline editing of metadata is now less likely to appear when you weren’t looking for it.
• We resolved a number of bugs that could crash the application (thanks for always submitting your crash reports. Your anonymous data really helps us track down issues!)

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