Andrew M. Whalen

If you haven’t seen it yet, Songbird is a Mozilla-based open-source music player. I’ve been using for some time now and it’s amazing.

Just like Firefox, it has a system of add-ons. The Notify Me add-on allows you to get Growl notifications when the song changes. Unfortunately, the add-on hasn’t been updated in 4 months. Here’s how I made it work with the latest version of Songbird.

Download the add-on from the Songbird Add-ons page. The .xpi file is just a zip file, and we have to unzip it to modify the contents. In Terminal, change to the directory where the .xpi file is (mine was on my desktop). Make a temporary folder to put the add-on files into when they’re unzipped. Put the .xpi into that folder and unzip it, then move the .xpi file out of there. Here’s the process in Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir notifyme
mv notifyme-osx-1.1.0.xpi notifyme/
cd notifyme
unzip notifyme-osx-1.1.0.xpi
mv notifyme-osx-1.1.0.xpi ../

Once unzipped you’ll find a file named install.rdf. Open that up in a plain-text editor (Not MS Word) and change the maxVersion variable to whatever version you want. I’m changing it from 1.1.0rc1 to 1.2.0a.

<em:maxVersion>1.1.0rc1</em:maxVersion>

Save install.rdf and zip the add-on back up (notice I changed the file name):

zip -r ../notifyme-osx-1.2.0a-unofficial.xpi .

You can then go to Tools -> Add-ons… in Songbird, click Install… and find the .xpi file you just zipped. It shouldn’t warn you about the version being incompatible anymore.

Although I just detailed how to do this and it worked for this add-on, I don’t recommended it. The max version is there for a reason. There may have been changes to Songbird that make an add-on incompatible with a higher version. Don’t blame me if you try this and your computer catches fire.

Here’s the finished product: notifyme-osx-120a-unofficial.xpi