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We’re excited to announce that Songbird is now in public Beta! This update to Songbird includes a new default look and feel, several new features, performance gains, improvements to stability and additional playback capabilities.
New Features
A New Look
We’ve completely redesigned Songbird to make it simpler and more intuitive. We’ve improved drag-and-drop throughout the application and worked to optimize music management vs. web browsing experiences.
Smart Playlists
Create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set.
Concert Tickets
Discover upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your library. Event listings powered by Songkick.
Last.fm Scrobbling
Integrated Last.fm support allows you to scrobble, love, and ban your tracks.
Album Artwork
Display the currently playing track’s album art and write new artwork back to the file.
Note: If you are upgrading from an older version of Songbird, be sure to get the Concerts and Last.fm add-ons so you can enjoy all the new features we’re talking about!
Performance Enhancements
A lot of users have asked us to devote cycles to focusing on performance and stability improvements. We made substantial investments in this release and will continue to dedicate much of our next release to focusing on this area. In this release we:

• Started our migration towards adopting GStreamer as our media core on all platforms. Starting with this release, GStreamer handles playback of FLAC files. In our next release, GStreamer will become our default media core and handle all codec playback and enable additional functionality, such as gapless playback.
• Improved startup performance. Launching Songbird is now significantly faster than before, in some cases by several orders of magnitude.
• Reduced memory usage on Windows and Linux by enabling jemalloc as Songbird’s memory allocator.
• Reduced the time it takes to import media and scan metadata. On all platforms reading metadata is now twice as fast.
• Improved search results and sort order by ignoring diacritics (like á, ö etc).

For Developers

• We’ve created a simple guide for updating 0.6 Feathers to be 0.7.0 compatible.
• We introduced a new Playback History API that allows add-on authors to access users’ playback history. The new Last.fm add-on is based on it.

Early Feedback on 0.7
“A marked improvement over the last release” - Jason Kincaid - TechCrunch
“Songbird’s new UI is also a major improvement” - Sarah Perez - ReadWriteWeb
What’s Next
As we march towards a 1.0 release, our goal is to improve existing features while continuing to focus on performance gains and stability issues. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date, or if you like to live dangerously check out one of our nightly builds and see the progress for yourself!

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This is a list of my favorite Windows applications that I honestly couldn’t live without that also work on Microsoft Windows Vista RC as well, much to my surprise. All of the software is free to download and use, and in fact most of them are open source.

ConTEXT - ConTEXT is a free and lightweight editor for programming or can be used as a notepad replacement. ConTEXT supports find and replace in multiple files at once so changing one method in loads of files is no longer an issue. Works in Vista with no problems whatsoever.

Synergy - Synergy is like a software KVM, but only shares keyboard and mouse capabilities. Synergy is multiplatform, and I currently use it to have my keyboard and mouse work in Ubuntu, Vista, and my Mac Mini running Leopard with no problem at all! This way I get to use my favorite keyboard and mouse and get to free up some space on my desk at the same time.

VLC - VLC has been my favorite media player for years now. VLC comes with most of the codecs you will need to watch videos on your PC already. VLC is very lightweight, and JUST WORKS, something that can’t be said about many media players. The only issue with VLC in Vista is that it turns Aero Glass off while it is playing.

FileZilla - I use FileZilla to interface with clients that still haven’t moved to SCP. FileZilla is an open source FTP client that gets the job done, supporting drag and drop, SSL, and NAT to NAT connections. The only thing it is missing is FXP support, but that’s not really a big deal in my case. Works fine in Vista with no problems at all.

IMGBurn - I love IMGBurn. This is hands-down the easiest way to burn .IMG, .ISO and BIN/CUE disk images to backup CDs or DVDs. Free, open source, and awesome. Works a treat in Microsoft Vista Beta 2 as well.

WinSnap - I use WinSnap to make many of the screen shots you see on blandname. WinSnap supports full screen and windowed screen shots, and also allows for rotation and drop shadows if you feel the need.

Electric Sheep - I often refer to Electric Sheep as “the best screensaver ever”, but truth be told, it’s really a collection of computer-generated screensavers that allow users to vote on them using a Digg-like system. On Windows, Electric Sheep uses bit torrent to transfer the sheep data. Again, working just fine in Vista!

Xming - Xming is my prefered interface to remote Linux boxes. Xming is for Linux what RDP is for Windows - you get a local X server and acceleration that displays data from remote applications running on Linux machines. Tested more than a few times to a remote Ubuntu computer, and one Gentoo box with no caveats.

WinSCP3 - SCP is now my preferred file transfer method. Luckily my favorite client also works on Vista, or I may not have used it at all. Much like FileZilla, WinSCP3 has a very simple, streamlined interface that is feature-rich and gets the job done, even on Vista.

So there you have it: 9 free applications I couldn’t live without that work just fine on Vista, and make it easy for me to do my day-to-day tasks. Hopefully someday this list will include F-Spot and Amarok, but I’m happy with this as a start considering neither of them work on Windows XP SP2 either!

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Checkout the Media Player toolbar in this shot - is Microsoft hiring suspicious characters now?

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