Songbird 1.2 with New Features Available for Download

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 19 Jun 2009

The team behind the open-source customizable music player and web browser Songbird has announced that version 1.2 of the software has moved out of Beta and a stable Songbird 1.2 is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Songbird 1.2 comes with several new features that will help you manage your songs, that will enhance Songbird-iTunes communication, that will enhance your volume customization options and that will bring forth more info from Last.fm.

Songbird comes with several performance enhancements as well, not just new features (we’ll present them momentarily). In terms of enhanced performance, Songbird 1.2 comes with: faster search; speedier delete numerous tracks at once; speedy select many tracks in the library process; the number of threads that have to be running has been reduced by half; fewer crashes.

And now, here are the new features of Songbird 1.2:

Manage songs easily: all the files contained in your library can be organized automatically by Songbird 1.2. Your media will be consolidated in one location after you enable the feature; you can also customize the structure of the folder and file names.

Enhanced Songbird-iTunes communication: for those of you that use the iTunes Music Store to purchase music, Songbird 1.2 comes with the option to automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. Exporting tracks and playlists from Songbird back to iTunes is also an option – and one that will come in handy when you want to easily sync your playlists with your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Enhanced volume customization: Songbird 1.2 comes with a 10-band equalizer which lets you tweak the frequency response of the audio playback so that it will match the acoustics in your room, or to match your audio preferences.

More info from Last.fm: you can now access additional artist, track and tag info, including photos and music videos. The Songbird 1.2 release notes describes this feature like this: “Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbors’ libraries.”

What’s next for the open-source music player and browser? According to Songbird’s Georges Auberger the development team will “continue to focus on building a world-class, open music player.” The next Songbird version “will consist of continued focus on performance and stability gains, implementing additional audio features, and much more.”

If you would like to get Songbird 1.2, a download location is available here.


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