First Nightingale media player release arrives

The Nightingale development team has published the first release of its open source media player and re-launched the project's web site. Nightingale was forked from the cross platform Songbird player after its developers announced that they would be dropping support for Linux, citing prioritisation issues.

Available for both Linux and Windows, this first preview release of Nightingale, labelled version 1.8.1, is based on Songbird 1.8.0 and Mozilla's XULRunner/Gecko technologies. The developers say that the preview release is aimed at showing users "the progress we're making in creating a new bird for playing the web, and to invite you to get involved in Nightingale’s development." Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter in the Nightingale Forums and on the project's IRC channel (irc.mozilla.org/#nightingale).

The next version of Nightingale is "slated for release within the next year" and will be based on the current 1.10.x Songbird trunk. The team says that this release should bring improved performance and stability, as well as "plenty of new features and improvements", noting that for Linux users, it will be the first to use only system libraries.

More details about the release can be found in a post on the Nightingale Community Blog and in the release notes. The preview release of Nightingale 1.8.1 is available to download for Linux (32- and 64-bit) and Windows; builds for Mac OS X are "coming in the next version (stable)".

See also:

• Songbird 1.10 brings two-way synchronisation, a report from The H.

(crve)