Songbird 0.7 RC1 Released

Following a “Blessed nightly build” which in my testing’s was unusable, the Songbird developers have released Songbird 0.7 Refresh Candidate 1, which I have been able try out, and have been very impressed by.

I continue to use Windows Media Player and Media Monkey for my music collection management, but I watch progress on Songbird and like to check out new releases as they become available.

I love the concept behind Songbird and I love what’s been created so far, however it still is a little lacking to become my default media player.

The aim however is for Songbird 1.0 to be out by December this year, with regular updates in the months leading up to then. Development seems to be on schedule and accelerating as Songbird gathers steam.

Songbird 0.7 comes with the following changes:

Refreshed UI: refined look and feel. Essentially an iTunes clone-style interface, however it really is a major improvement on the old ‘Rubber Ducky’ theme, although it may take a few minutes to get used to. I personally love it.
New setup assistant
Smart playlists: Another iTunes inspired feature, but a good one at that. I nice addition to the growing Songbird feature list.
Last.fm support:No longer necessary to download a separate plugin for Lastfm integration, it comes built in and scrobbles your library for you.
GStreamer on all platforms:“This is our first cross platform release using GStreamer as our new media core, by default it handles all FLAC playback on Windows/Mac (or you can enable GStreamer to handle more codecs)”
Faster Media scanning and reading: I definitely noticed this, Songbird is handling my 8000 item library pretty smoothly now.
Lower memory usage: Another welcome improvement.

Here is a shot of the new interface:

Incidentally Songbird has created some really simple ways for anyone to theme the program which is great news for the less technical minded people like me.