pvh's dashboard

Something went amiss -- we're looking into it. Never fear, the nightlies will return.

Looks like Songbird's not happy on anyone's Debian x64. We're not sure why, but that seems to be what's up.

Fantastic! This has actually been done by Simon! (See Laura's comment below. :) – pvh, on September 23, 2009 17:39

Awesome! Simon is the man! – pvh, on September 23, 2009 17:39

Nope, no video podcast. At least, not until Songbird supports video. – pvh, on September 18, 2009 09:08

Hi ZoneSong, I fixed this and it'll be in the next release.

It's not so much the project bugs which will be creating the new UI but actual broken behavior. I'm looking for things like "these podcasts don't download". Or "podcasts make my computer catch fire" or "podcasts appear with the wrong metadata". Those kinds of things. Actual features, I'm sorry to say, will have to wait. – pvh, on September 13, 2009 04:42

Okay, gents and ladies -- speaking HYPOTHETICALLY since there's no guarantee I can actually do this -- but if I could squeeze a few bug fixes into some upcoming release to make podcasting less broken if not more awesome, what would they be? Replies would ideally be links to candidate bugs already in the system, or less ideally links to bugs you filed, or least ideally just your personal opinion.

Before anyone gets too excited, I definitely can't guarantee I'll be able to get you anything at all. In fact, it's likely that it's already too late for next release, but I'll see what (little) I can do.

cd ripping is important to some people, podcasting to others. people who come to the podcasting-doesn't-work thread in our forum are going to be heavily biased towards people who want podcasting. :) – pvh, on September 13, 2009 04:06

klint, you don't need to use Genre, just make a new songbird property for it -- it's only one line of code more. of course you should READ the genre to be sure it's a podcast, but you don't need to go with it. – pvh, on September 13, 2009 04:04

Yep, that can absolutely be done in an extension. Here's a quick sketch of how:
1) Recognize or label a podcast.
2) Add a custom property for a podcast media item which notes the time when the podcast is stopped/paused. (Listen to the media core.)
3) When a podcast begins playback, seek to that position minus a few seconds. – pvh, on September 10, 2009 15:44

Thanks Stephanie. If you do switch away, I hope you'll try us again once podcasting support lands. Also, not to promise anything, but audiobooks are out there on the list somewhere too. Just... somewhere in the distance after podcasts, I'm sure. – pvh, on September 10, 2009 07:13

Don't be intimidated. We don't bite! Okay, well, aus can be a bit prickly sometimes. He hates because he loves. Or something. We love him, anyway. You should too.

There are lots of ways to look into development beyond the roadmap and the blog posts. The best of all is probably to follow the release page which shows the current progress of the next version. See http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases... and its ilk. It's basically as close as you can come to sitting in on our weekly engineering meetings, and the roadmap doesn't necessarily get updated as frequently as that page, which generally reflects what we're actually hacking on more closely at any given point. – pvh, on September 09, 2009 18:13

I can't blame you, no. I've nearly given up myself a few times. It has been two years that I've heard I'd be working on it "next release".

So, no, I don't know when podcasting is going to reach the front of the list. I'd tell you it was Madonna (or whatever our M release will be) but the opinion of one engineer would carry far less weight than a formal roadmap and as you've seen in the past, there are no guarantees regardless. In the words of Blizzard, "it'll be out when it's finished."

I, for one, certainly hope podcasting will come soon, and will continue to agitate to make it happen. In the mean time, I hope you will continue to encourage a lively debate, to continue to nag and needle us, and when that day comes I hope you will all download early betas and give feedback, and help us make that release the best that it can be. I also hope that the debate can remain cordial (albeit disappointed) and that those enthusiastic few who defend us will have enough understanding to weather the abuse of those who may have lost their faith. – pvh, on September 08, 2009 23:32

Hi!

Whooee, there seems to be some gas on this fire.

I know that many of you in this thread simply can't use Songbird until it has working podcasting support. But it doesn't. Sorry.

Speaking as a developer (and not officially for the company) at least I can shed some light on what's going on here, why podcasting isn't in the next release and how that makes me feel.

First, a little background. I've been working on Songbird since 0.4, and if I remember correctly, fixing up the podcasting support was pretty much the first project I wanted to take on. Since then, I've been personally disappointed as podcasting has slipped from every release one after another. I feel your pain. I am also annoyed. It sucks, and I complain loudly every time this happens. People have come to expect it.

Having sat in on all those engineering and planning meetings (and even having spent a couple weeks getting started on the new podcasting work last month) I can say that we ALL want to fix podcasting. The problem is, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work. There are new dialogs to add, device support to think about, all kinds of issues.

Worse still, a lot of the code that is in Songbird at the moment around podcasting is utterly broken, flawed, or otherwise junky. Fixing it up and making it the way we want has been determined to be a waste of effort. That's why I'm never given a free hand to go fix those bugs you see in Bugzilla. It's just too far gone. Most of that stuff is going to be replaced by a new, shiny podcasting system. You can see the list of podcasting rewrite project tasks filed here:

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/bugl...[podcast]

That's 77 bugs (as of this writing) not counting any additional intake due to problems we find or other work that needs doing. When we cost our projects, we assign all our bugs a 1, 2, or 3 cost and experience has shown that over a long period we tend to close about 5 points per engineer per week across all projects. That basically means that with the two engineers who were available in Kanye (me and Erik) we weren't going to be able to seal the deal. You can do the math yourself.

The worse news is that the video support work we need in Led Zeppelin is actually much further along and has fewer user interface elements, which are by far the most time consuming and difficult part of creating a consumer application. There simply aren't going to be enough hands on deck next release to get the job done right either. If you can change that, send us patches, or better yet, your resume.

As a company, PoTI plans new features, and we publish our best estimate of when things will come, but they absolutely aren't promises, and when push comes to shove we have to make tough choices and somebody always gets left out. This time (like every time before) podcasting got pushed out. Again. Yes, it hurts, but this isn't a hobby project running out of someone's basement. People's jobs, people's money, and (most significantly) global domination are at stake here.

So, if you can't use Songbird without podcasting support, please accept my personal apology and keep using whatever tool is serving you better. When that day does come, I hope you'll find that we did the job right and built something rock solid.

For everybody else, we're all waiting together.

Now, having said that, I'm going to go back to trying to get these MTP bugs fixed so y'all can have another release.

I'll watch the thread for a bit and answer any questions you have as best I can.

Edit: Oh yeah, I should add -- this thread is so long that wanted to point out that I haven't read all of it, so please take that into consideration and feel free to re-ask me any questions you may have directly.

Songbird doesn't support CD playback, ripping or burning. We're hoping to get to these in a release some time soon. When they come, you won't be able to miss it.