Stevo's dashboard

Currently FLAC filetypes do not have the album art written back to them, however mp3 and some others do. This can be turned off in the Album Art Preferences to be sure. Also ratings are not written to the files by default. You can check the following preferences in about:config (type in your url bar)

songbird.metadata.ratings.enableWriting (false by default)
songbird.metadata.artwork.enableWriting (true by default)

All other data like Artist, Album, Track name etc are written to the file if you change them in Songbird. I would recommend making the files read only if you do not want to have them modified so they no longer match the *cough*source*cough*.

Also Songbird does not support obtaining media illegally, we are assuming the torrents you are downloading are free for distribution (Creative Commons).

We currently don't have support for Album Art in Flac files :(. Only mp3 at this point. It would probably make sense to put that information somewhere, maybe in Help or possibly the Album Artwork preference pane.

You could post a bounty on bountyup.com and then tell people about it here, you pay people money do do an add-on and it will get done sooner than later :). I am not sure that we have the resources to put something up like mozilla does at this time but using external sources is always an option.

Depending on time I would totally grab some bounties :).

Actually in this day and age there are several alternatives for a product to make money without charging the user directly. Look at Firefox, Hulu, Komodo, Adium, etc. It all depends on the application, and Email clients are now fitting into this "free" category. – Stevo, on August 12, 2009 23:24

I wish we could do this, however this would require us reverse engineering the Apple TV Sync spec something we are not going to do. Also at this point we would only be able to sync Music, which would leave out TV, Movies, etc. It would be nice in the future however I don't see this happening unless we have a very willing community member to build an Apple TV add on.

Yes it would seem that we are treating case difference as a rename, this is bad and should have a bug filed against it.

I am sorry to hear that you have lost most of your media. Songbird will delete media items if they are located under your selected Media Managed Folder and remove them from the library (if you have the Media Management feature enabled). I think we are missing the dialog that questions you if you wish to delete the files for the items you are removing from the library as well.

First off thank you all for your responses here, I was one of the main developers of this feature and I appreciate getting feed back on it.

As for the UI issues, yes we do lack in documentation and this is something I will be bringing up with the product managers. We are given a limited amount of time to do what they require, documentation has never had time allocated for it. This is a major oversight on our part and I apologize for my lack of attention.

As for the feature itself there are a few things we assumed when building it, number one we did not enable it by default. If you are enabling a feature you do not understand I would assume that you would ask about it first. However it looks like for some people this is not the case and they have enabled it anyways. We also tried to follow along the same flow that iTunes does when it organizes music, this includes copying from external folder only (not moving) to prevent loss of media. This is why when a user selects a different folder than where there media is currently located they get a complete copy of the media. When items are renamed or the folder is the same as where the media is located then we move items around in that folder, which is why you will see all of your media reorganized since it is based on the meta data tags.

In any case this is a new feature which as any other new feature should be used with caution, we try to test our features out as best we can, and we have beta versions that allow other users to test as well (understanding that they may loose information). Unfortunately we can not catch every bug or different users perspective.

There has been an excellent community effort to document how Songbird works on our wiki: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Getting_.... I recommend this to everyone using songbird now or in the future.

Thank you again for your response, and if you have any more questions or issues please post here so we can make Songbird the best media player out there :).

It looks like we are watching the album art property (primaryImageURL) when we shouldn't be :(. We should create a bug with this and check the service for when it has OnItemUpdated called. – Stevo, on June 18, 2009 23:30

Not likely, for one Songbird is not an html based app it is a XULRunner based app which involves C++, JS, HTML, XML etc. This would not be an easy port and probably would not bring much value to the company. There are other things that can be done like the Sonbird remote control could be ported from the iPhone to the Palm Pre so you could control your Songbird from your phone :).

Interesting, I test this with an external Firewire drive on Windows Vista and it works fine, however I have not tested this on a network drive. If you could give us a bit more details on what type of network drive it is (SMB, AFP, NFS etc) and how your trying to organize your library we can file a bug on this and get it fixed for you :).

I have to not agree with the constant focus on the search text box, I personally don't use that to play my music.
I do totally agree with the hotkeys, we need a better system for that.