Nightingale Media Player Preview Released

First time accepted submitter ilikenwf writes "You may or may not remember the Mozilla-based Songbird media player, which dropped official Linux support in April, 2010. Since then, the Nightingale community fork has waxed and waned in terms of membership and progress, but thanks to having a completely new dev team has today produced a preview build based on Songbird 1.8.1. The team promises a release of a Songbird trunk based build later this year, with fixes and an upgrade to Gecko 6. Plans to support Linux, Windows, and Mac are in the works, with the preview builds being available only for Linux and Windows at the moment. Aside from trying to pull in refugees from the Songbird community, Nightingale wants more developers to aid in fixing dropped and broken features from Songbird — and to add new ones."

Re:Why?

[MrEricSir]

Or Rhythmbox, or Amarok, or Banshee, or Exaile, or Guayadeque...

Thought I'd give it a try...

[ADRA]

1. Stability
First time importing my songs: Crash
Second time importing my songs: Went fine

2. Online Integration
All the help / addons / web integration stuff seems to be no-show. The pages are 404's, empty, or wiki not found's...

3. Video Playback (or lack thereof)
Attempted to load some videos and it constantly complained about not having the codecs to play them. The 'solution' given was to visit the Wiki page... which doesn't exist...

Well, at least the media playback and selection works more or less after getting started. Its not in a state which I'd consider switching, but it has at least some potential.

Re:A humble request for Linux media player develop

[Per Wigren]

gapless != cross-fade. An MP3 stream is divided into frames that are larger than CD frames. If a song ends in the middle of a frame, that frame is padded with silence which cause an audio dropout when playing albums with continuous sound, like live recordings for example. Most modern MP3 encoders (at least LAME) use a non-standard (but nowadays defacto-standard) tag to store the exact byte on which the song ends so players can skip the silent padding and play the album just like the original CD would had. Worth noting is that this problem is MP3-specific. All modern codecs/containers already handle this natively.