PortableApps.com is proud to announce the release of Songbird Portable 1.4.3. Songbird is a full-featured digital media library that enables the seamless syncing of all your music, and provides intuitive and powerful music management features. With Songbird, your music is organized and presented exactly as you like and as a portable app so you have all your music the way you want it wherever you go. This release updates Songbird to the latest version. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.
Features
Songbird is full-featured digital media player with lots of great features including:
- Media Importing/Exporting: Add media to Songbird by importing from your file system or iTunes. Export your tracks and playlists back into iTunes.
- Library Files Organization: Automatically organize the files contained in your library. Consolidate your media in one location. Customize the structure of the folder and file name based on metadata contained in every track.
- Watch Folders: Automatically import media from a defined folder.
- Library Management: Browse, organize, sort and search your media.
- Smart Playlists: Create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set.
- Album Artwork: Display the currently playing track's album art and write new artwork back to the file. Automatically fetch missing album art from the web.
- Media Playback: Songbird supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
- Gapless Playback & Replay Gain: Skips padding data due to encoding and chains files for gapless playback experience. Adjusts the playback gain appropriately if a track's metadata contains replay gain information.
- GStreamer: Songbird uses GStreamer as the main media playback system, across all platforms.
- Web Browser: Songbird includes an integrated web browser with features like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and more.
- Multi-language Support: Over 25 completed, community-contributed localizations and growing!
- Custom UI: Make Songbird your own by choosing from dozens of different
skinsfeathers. - Developer Support: Songbird is getting better everyday thanks to its open platform and growing developer community.
PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format
Songbird Portable is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.
Download
Songbird Portable is available for immediate download from the Songbird Portable homepage. Get it today!
Songbird™ and the Songbird logo are trademarks of Pioneers of the Inevitable and are used with permission.
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Comments
Thanks GizmoKid2005
Thanks GizmoKid2005
Thanks for the new version
Thanks for the new version
I think I will wait until another version....
this takes about as long to load as Firefox... open source can be 'kool' at times, but bloaty, long time loading, and crashes regularly... I guess that is why it is called FREE. Thanks for the work... You got me to try it again...
...
Most of it is probably cause your usb drive is slow :/ Songbird is plenty fast for me.
Stated
As stated: "Launch Speed: As Songbird is a more drive-intensive app, it can take as much as a minute or more to start when running from a flash drive. Please be patient."
If you have a slow or only average speed flash drive, it'll be slow. If you have a portable hard drive or fast flash drive, it works just fine. The fix is to get a better drive, or use a less full-feature media player. Coolplayer+ Portable works well from even slow drives. And we're gonna debut a couple more media players shortly.
Fast
What would be a (cheap) example of a fast flash drive?
Not Cheap
Fast flash drives aren't cheap. It's not based on the stated read and write numbers (which are best case large files and not indicative of portable app performance at all). It's based on good components like fast ram and good, dual-channel controllers. None of the fast drives I've seen are cheap.
The fastest true flash drive
The fastest true flash drive that I've ever used was a Corsair Flash Voyager GT. I have the 4GB model and it was $60 new when other 4GB drives were going for $20. I now use a 2.5" ext. hdd, so speed isn't an issue, though it's not quite as convenient as a USB stick is.
fast drive for the money
I use a 32gig cavalrystorage solid state - pelican. It is the size of a laptop hard drive but has both usb and sata connectors and is fast on usb. I use a long usb cord so I can set the drive in the vicinity of the pc (ontop of the case or in front of the keyboard or such). Besides the speed I like that it takes away from the paranoia of accidently clipping the usb stick and damaging it. Also I like that if somehow the usb connector got mangled that I might be able to access from sata (also hoping that when usb3.0 becomes standard I could use an sata to usb3.0 adapter assuming I do not just get another ssd instead).
Pat
Love it
This app works beautifully on my flash drive, never crashed, fast load up.
Good flashes drives are not always costly, stores have sales you know
Any (portable) performance testers?
Are there any programs that one could use to test their flash drive's (or other drive's) performance?
If possible, are there any portable programs (since that's mainly all I use)?
The Songbird site suggests
The Songbird site suggests its an Audio library/player? Thid site refers to 'full-featured digital media library' wheras digital media in my thinking translates to Audio/Music/Images or even CD/DVD. The name SONGbird suggests the emphasis toward Audio. If so.. Should that not been made more clear in the description for people not familiar with this software?
Great release nonetheless!
They are still working on
They are still working on Video support in the player, just check their roadmap. I'm not sure about photos, but video is on the to-do list and they are working on it.
YouTube and Flickr
I think it already does associated YouTube videos and Flickr images
thanks, i recently found this
thanks, i recently found this program... and it's a nice program
This is great!
It launches about as fast as firefox does on my drive, which is just an 8GB Cruzer Micro.
Faster still
You may have noticed that larger USB thumb drives have not hit the market in some 6+ months. Manufactures are waiting for the USB 3.0 standard to be made public early in 2010. Once that happens, not only will you have access to 5Gb/sec transfers from your thumb drive, but you will also start seeing 40, 60, 80, 100+ GB thumb drives hitting the market. I think I'll wait until then.
Not Really
The current big flash drives are slow due to their internal components. They don't come anywhere near the limits of USB 2.0. This is why portable USB hard drives are so much faster with portable apps (they're not limited by slow RAM chips).
The USB 3.0 flash drives won't be any faster than the USB 2.0 ones unless they use better RAM and controllers, in which case they'll be *much* more expensive... just like the premium USB 2.0 flash drives are now.
The bottom line is that flash drives are held back by internal hardware. USB flash drives are NOT held back by USB 2.0. They never have been.
Songbird Crashes When Launched
Unfortunately, Songbird Portable 1.4.3 won't run on my system, Win XP SP3. This is the first portable app I've ever downloaded that won't run at all. Every time I launch it, the splash screen comes up, and as soon as the application opens, the crash reporter replaces it.
There isn't enough information in the crash report to determine what might be causing it to crash. I installed the software to a hard drive to make testing easier. But even reinstalling it several times, with different options and plugins selected, didn't fix the problem.
UPDATE:
I finally found the problem that caused the Songbird crashes. On my original installations, I chose the option to not import my iTunes library and playlists, regardless of whether I installed any add-ons. By enabling the option to allow the iTunes import, and unchecking all of the add-ons during installation, Songbird finally opened and is now running. Even though I'm glad that I finally got this software to work, I would have preferred a less stressful and time-consuming installation process.
Cache and temp files at temp windows folder?
If i used internet, search music, oh also firefox. Cache and any file is always store to my flash disk, is cut age my fd!. And make corrupt file. So i request launcher can direct all cache or any files saved addon or history or any place to temp folder at windows folder. But some rule to can store in usb disk in ini files directly and can quick create profile with same firefox folder , because i don't like deafult folder, but i change location firefox no load it but some addon detect installed and load all profile but no at firefox, i thing is bug of launcher. And also some condition always crashed and load local profile. I mean is load profile in usb disk but ff set or songbird it will load local too deafult set. Sorry.
Bad Drive
If you get corruption just from the Songbird cache on your drive, you have a bad drive and should replace it before it dies for good.
For The Interested...
Songbird will soon be available pre-installed on GoGear MP3 Players
Lets hope for an addon or such to make these new players work with Songbird Portable.
Are the post installation add-ons still portable?
I had a previous installation of Songbird but hadn't really used it. Installing 1.43, it declared some add-ons incompatible. I had it update those. Then it said it had some other neat new add-ons and did I want them? I said yes and it did.
OK, so, what are the chances that it is still a portable and stealth program?
I'm amused that, as soon as you install it, it pops up a survey asking how you use it. Not the first program I've seen like that. There is even a download site that requires you to fill out a survey on how much you like the program before it will allow you to download it.
-----Paul-----
Add-ons
Add-ons are still portable within Songbird. They've been designed in such a way that all the addons that I've seen use either relative paths or are updated by the launcher so it doesn't affect portability.
The usability survey is a development tool for them, to figure out what areas they should concentrate on in development and what bug(s) to put at a higher priority based on usage statistics collected.
problems solved
My problems loading Songbird - as reported for version 1.2 - on C are solved in 1.4.3 - no warnings or errors about not loaded components anymore...
Marc
Metadata not being applied to files
Hi all, it seems that songbird is failing to change the metadata on the physical files I've already changed. Any suggestions to a fix?
This is more than likely an
This is more than likely an issue with the local install as well, or possibly a setting. Try checking with Songbird's help, either via IRC, their bugzilla, or their get satisfaction page.
Not there yet.
First, thanks for making this portable!!!
I've played with it (1.4.3) for the past week and there are a few problems. I don't think any of the problems have anything to do with it being portable or not.
It has issues with writing tags and reading them, especially the song rating tag. While all my other tagging software and multimedia can read the tags songbird has problems here. Secondly, importing files, especially when using "managed files," usually ends with only partial imports. Out of 16G I got 700M to move.
Songbird has a lot of promise but seems to have a lot of bugs that can end use wasting a lot of user time. Hopefully it will get better and this portable version allows all of us to test it out and give feedback so thanks again to portableapps.com!
Just thought other users might want to be aware of write/read issues.
thx
very slow with large library
i use songbird portable every day, and it works really great!
but there's one big problem:
it takes about 10 minutes (!) to close songbird! it doesn't matter if i changed any data in the library or not.
i use it with my 2.5" external HDD via USB2.0, so drive speed is rather not the problem. (all other file operations have the correct speed)
and i use songbird with a very large library (more than 66.000 songs according to songbird, but a lot of them are duplicates... but that seems to be a songbird internal problem). with very small libraries (just a few songs) songbird closes with usual speed.
i don't know how songbird handles its library data and how the launcher manipulates them. but i think songbird tries to store all the library data when closing, and maybe the launcher has to parse the file paths additionally...?
so i hope there is a possibility to optimize this part of songbird, either by the songbird team or by the portable apps team...
tom
ps: this problem will get rather bigger than smaller, since the next release of songbird will manage videos and pictures, too (according to their roadmap)
Hmmm
If you can test this with a local install and see the same issue, which I'm pretty sure it will be, you can report this to the Songbird team. Any updates that the PortableApps.com version makes to Songbird's files is ALWAYS done upon launch, not shutdown, so that shouldn't be any issue at all.
Thanks
good to know, that the portableapps only affect launching, not closing. so it has to be done within songbird...
the songbird guys seem to be quite busy right now... so i don't think they care much about portability-troubles ;o(
i'll try to do a local test-install located at the same HDD ( usually i don't do local install at external drives
) to verify our assumption.