Songbird 0.6 Final Released: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!

Download Songbird 0.6 (release notes)

The march towards our first public beta has begun! We’ve been sifting through comments from the community and using user feedback as one of our guides to help make Songbird better. We hope you enjoy our latest update.

What’s New in 0.6

In this release you’ll notice significant performance improvements and many new features:

Performance Enhancements

Larger Library Support
Songbird can now easily handle libraries with 10,000+ tracks.

Smoother Scrolling
Once the metadata scanner is done, scrolling in a large library is smooth and responsive.

Faster Filtering
Filtering by genre, artist, album, and year is almost instantaneous.

Speedier Search
No long lags or locked up UI when searching your Library.

Improved Memory Management
On Windows and Linux we implemented jemalloc as our memory allocator for XULRunner and have noticed approximately 15-20% memory reduction in common user tasks.

New Features

Metadata Writing
We have a new Metadata Editor that allows you to edit your media and write the changes back to your file(s). You can read a bit more about it here.

Sync Support for MTP Devices
On Windows, MTP Devices now support Sync functionality!

Improved iPod Support
The iPod add-on has been rewritten and a number of bugs have been squashed. We have also started maintaining a new wiki page that details what iPod models we support.

The Edit Menu Works!
Copy, paste, select all, undo, redo, delete and find text to your heart’s content.

Find Text on Webpages
A number of users asked for a way to easily search for text within a webpage, now you can!

Filter/Sort by Bitrate and Sample Rate
Now you can easily sort and filter your library by sound quality.

Simpler View Menu
It’s easier to switch feathers and show/hide display panes than ever before.

SHOUTcast Radio
Easily discover and stream music using the new integrated SHOUTcast Radio directory.

For Developers

We’ve created a simple guide for updating 0.5 Feathers to be 0.6 compatible.

Early Feedback on 0.6 is Positive

“I’m happy to report that for the first time Songbird was actually able to scan and index all 140 GB worth of my music without issue” – Scott Gilbertson – WIRED

“I’ve been testing [Songbird] out at each point release, and have been blown away by the improvements in speed and stability in 0.6rc4. I have a library of almost 30,000 songs and this release of songbird handles it like a charm. The last release was unusable for a library of this size. Well Done and keep it up!” – chasingtheflow – Songbird user

What’s Next for Songbird?

We’ve already started working on the next release! Our goal is to focus on user experience optimizations and performance improvements. Here’s a preview of some of what we’re currently exploring: new look and feel for Songbird (layout and feather changes), new first-run experience, more intuitive drag & drop interactions, smart playlist functionality, watch folders, continued performance improvements, and much more. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date on our progress or check out one of our nightly builds and see for yourself! We’re always interested in hearing your feedback so please comment on our blog and file bugs and/or feature requests in bugzilla. Our next stop is a more public beta, hope to see you there!

(Via Songbird Blog.)