Songbird 1.1.1 Released

Songbird 1.1.1

Apparently it was released like a week or so ago, but it’s news to people that didn’t know that yet. For some reason the Songbird engine doesn’t auto update like all the other Mozilla releases so you will have to do this on your own but you can always download Songbird and install it with no issue. The upgrade process should be common to all who regularly make certain that they are using the newest software.

Some of the better features that I had hoped for are kind of… well they are missing. The additions that did make it into the relase can be found in the release notes or shortly as follows.

• Fetching of album artwork – essentially you can right click and get the album art in the player.
• MTP Device support – used to sync products like the Zune.
• Watch folders – this just scans a folder to see if any changes are made to that folder, if files change it will also be represented in the Songbird playlist.
• Better sorting – this is just pretty much stripping out “the” and “a” out of a file name or artist name.
• Replay gain – if a file has replay gain specified in the meta it will adjust the playback accordingly.
• Improved memory usage and performance – more for systems with low amounts of memory for large collections the database has been tuned down to not use as much memory.

What I was looking for with new features was a graphic equalizer, a now playing tab, and visualizations would push Songbird over the top and could completely replace Winamp. For the time being though it looks like they are making some progress and hopefully Songbird 2 will have all the features that I really look forward to in a media player.

So for now I will wait on the team over at Mozilla and pass on my hopes that they can make changes quickly, with the media player market so congested with choices I am sure that Mozilla can come out on top. Thanks for the good work guys!!!