Songbird 0.5

Songbird 0.5 was released last week, and, while not technically inconsistent with claims that its RSS parsing had been “improved,” I was disappointed to see that two of my three podcast subscriptions still aren’t coming through. The problem has been migrated to a new bug ticket.

There’s also a new “Media Views” feature, which looks promising. As of now the only add-on to take advantage of this is a simple tag-cloud library view, but I imagine things could get really elaborate there. Their line, “Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anticipating all kinds of innovative browsing environments; picture a navigable mood-cluster terrain, or a pannable, zoomable, clickable history wavegraph. I’m seriously considering teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hotness add-on.

Amazingly, 0.1 was first released over two years ago. And their releases have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.

4 Responses to “Songbird 0.5”

  1. mig says:

    So, there’s actually a few addons for showing media views.

    I wrote a proof of concept “watch me bring your machine to its knees” view, here:

    http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/170

    The trick is to NOT make a kazillion playlist elements like I do, each one will eat a thread and lots of RAM. Other than that, XUL is pretty easy, it’s essentially just like working with XHTML.

  2. Jay says:

    Katie: Cool! Reminds me of this.

    mig: Oh, I didn’t notice those other addons. I wish items in the addon directory were taggable or categorizable. Anyway I do not possess nearly enough knowledge to develop Songbird extensions yet. All I can do is dream :c

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