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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 quick guide will get you started backing up your CDs on you PowerPC Mac, or even your spanking new Intel MacBook Pro!

I recently downloaded and installed a wonderful application called Max from Sbooth software. Max is absolutely free, and not only that, but it’s also open source (OSS) and a universal binary.

Max reminds me quite a bit of EAC which is my favorite audio CD backup program when running Windows. In fact, one of the few things I had always longed to do on my G4 Mac Mini was backup some of my audio CDs for use with my iPod Mini.

Now I know that iTunes will rip CDs to MP3, but it doesn’t offer too much in terms in functionality. For exmaple, if you have a scratched CD, iTunes will often have problems with the file. iTunes also only converts one file at a time, making the process quite slow. Of course, Max can both copy from scratched audio CDs, as well as rip multiple tracks at once if you have multiple cores or processors such as the Mac Pro or the dual G4 and G5 workstations. With these computers iTunes is simply wasting your time and giving you bad quality files. Did I mention Max supports lossless formats? I could go on and on. Let’s get ripping!
First you’ll want to download the files from SourceForge (SourceForge is a great source of Open Source programs). Click on this link to download the latest Max release for OS X

Getting Started

Once you’ve downloaded the Max archive, installation is a snap (like most other Mac software). If you used Safari, FireFox or Opera, the file will have decompressed (expanded) to your desktop already. Even on Leopard it does the same thing. Double click on the Max folder and drag the Max application file (the one that looks like a blank CD with “Max” written on it with a red marker). We’re going to drag this file into the applications folder on your main hardware for easy access later. Once you’ve done this, you may also want to drag the file from there to your toolbar for later use.

OK, time to run Max for the first time. Are you liking the name “Max” yet? It reminds me of “Macs”.

Double-click on the icon for Max in your application folder, or single-click on the dock icon. Max will start up magically at your command and is now ready to backup your CDs in multitudinous formats. Huzzah.

To select which output formats will be generated:
1. Open the Formats section of the Preferences and double-click the desired format from the list of available formats
2. Edit the encoder settings, if desired

To create audio files from compact discs:
1. Insert the compact disc
2. Select the correct album information from that retrieved, if prompted to do so
3. If desired, download album art by selecting Download Album Art… from the Compact Disc menu
4. Click the Select All button
5. Click the Encode icon in the toolbar
6. The encoded files will be placed in your Music folder

To convert existing audio files to other formats:
1. Drag the files you would like to convert to the Converter window
⁃ Alternatively, select Convert Files… from the File menu
2. The converted files will be placed in your Music folder

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