Just a small update, the Songbird 1.1.2 Fedora RPMs are now available in the usual place. Fedora adoption is moving along and hopefully will happen in the near future. The main push behind the 1.1.2 release was a couple of bugs, including a top crasher that was identified after the 1.1.1 release. Updating is recommended, although you shouldn't see too much of a difference.

The last couple of weeks have seen some interesting bugs creep up in the Songbird 1.1.1 release. First we had the annoying gconf popup with bug 15432, and then everyone quickly noticed that songs would hang after a plays, which was noted in bug 15401. Well I'm happy to say that these bugs have now been squashed and you can go back to happily listening to your ridiculously huge library of mp3s... except that's only half true, and so begins my rant...

As we soon found out, the bugs actually were never present in Songbird. They are, in fact, a bi-product of the package (rpm) building. I collaborated with a few different package builders from Gentoo and SUSE when we quickly realized that the bugs weren't in official Songbird builds, but were in every Linux package build.

What's the problem you say? Sadly, it's the way Songbird is developed. You see, unlike many other open source project in the Linux world, Songbird is built much like a Windows app. Now, that could be because it started out as a Windows app to begin with, or just because that's the particular model that the developers choose to go with, but the fundamental issue is that Songbird acts as it's own universe instead of fitting into the various popular Linux models out there. Much like Windows apps, it is all inclusive and provides everything it needs.

Songbird 1.1.1 dropped a few days ago and I'm happy to report that the Fedora RPM's are also now finished and available. A lot of work went into this release and Songbird now boasts a much reduced cpu and memory footprint, embedded album art fetching, and watch folders!

Now that Fedora 10 has also been out for quite some time, I'm dropping Fedora 9 builds to save space and bandwidth. If anyone would like an F9 RPM feel free to grab the SRPM provided and respin it. As far as I know the two should build the same, however, Songbird is beginning the rely on newer and newer gstreamer code, so it's possible you might be missing already upstreamed patches if you do decided to go F9.

Also, one thing to note about the current 1.1.1 under Linux. Myself and others have been seeing two bugs in particular that are quite annoying. The first is a javascript error that show up soon after a first run:

SBAppInitialize:SBRegisterSongbirdProtocol()
TypeError: Components.classes['@mozilla.org/gnome-gconf-service;1'] is
undefined

The relevant bugzilla ticket can be found over at bug 15432.