Mini Review: Songbird
Songbird, a powerful music player and manager based on the Firefox platform, was launched today. I just installed it and I must say the interface is top notch. Being an iTunes user, I immediately felt at home; everything was where I expected it to be and the menus were rather intuitive. There is even something called a remote playlist which, from the best of my knowledge right now, lets you stream or download music from a URL, perhaps a feed. I can’t get my Songbird to do too much right now as it keeps trying to connect to the Songbird server, which has been down all day from excessive traffic. I forgot to mention, however, that the interface is a very sleek black (you can go to File > Alternate Skin for a red skin)! Songbird uses its Firefox platform to integrate an advanced services feature allowing you to browse content on many audio related sites such as Odeo, SHOUTcast, Amazon and others. Briefly playing around with this, I found out that it would detect all streams and display them for you to play whichever you choose. As expected, you can also browse regular websites through the integrated browser. There is also a feature to easily switch between languages quickly - there are already about 20 languages supported.
Like iTunes, Songbird has a mini-player which unlike iTunes’ mini-player, looks great. Songbird has a lot going for it, but they still need to incorporate some key features that this preview leaves out. Things like an equalizer are absent in this preview. Once sufficient devices support, including iPod support, makes it into Songbird, Apple may need to watch their back - everyone loves the little open source app that makes it big, *cough* Firefox. Songbird may very well be THE music player/manager for all Linux users, beating out Amarok and RhthymBox. The preview released today is a “proof-of-concept” distribution, so it was only available for Windows. There is, however, a strong possibility of Songbird being released on Linux and Mac in the near future. I hope to hear more about Songbird in the future. Download the preview (from yousendit because Songbird’s server is down) and let me know what you think.
I was thrilled to know it has the ability to search folders for new media, the one feature that keeps me from switching to iTunes as my primary music manager. But from my five-minutes experience with Songbird, I’d say it has a long way to go before I’ll consider it.
For starters, as of now, it is way too slow. Granted, it may be due to its server downtime, but it took forever to start, and was at least five times slower than iTunes to load all my media into the library.
Also, I wasn’t so thrilled with the interface as you. Especially, the ID3 tag-editing implementation seems very awkward to me - and a major let down, since it is one of the most satisfying parts of iTunes. And I really hated the skins. One can only hope it will be easy for users to make their own skins, as it is with Firefox.
It looks promising, especially the ability to quickly download MP3s from sites, which should make music blogs all the more useful. But it has some major bugs to sort out (with me, it wasn’t even able to properly sort out the musics by album or artist) before it’s any good for end users. And I sure as hell would love to see a better ID3 editing tool.
I assume that skins will be easy enough to create and distribute. Hopefully, the Songbird developers will make an addons site similar to the one for Firefox, so users can easily find new skins and perhaps extensions.
Anything based on Firefox is ok by me! Have been having a play with it this afternoon, and although its got more bugs then a Sellafield hooker it looks like this is going to be a damn good player.
I refuse to use iTunes on principle; nothing against Apple, I just don’t like the way the program is so “iPod, Apple Store, Quicktime†orientated. Been using Winamp for years, but it would be great to have something that I can get working with my Creative MP3 player.
By the way Paul- your RSS feed is has been down all day.
Hmm, according to feedburner there have been no problems today. Weird.
thats a cool piece of code ;-) very interesting. I keep that thing in my focus.
Greetz from Switzerland
spot
When it gets on its feet I will definately consider replacing my current media player (winamp, and core media player). It has a very nice skin and overall layout. I did not notice the same problems with the music organizer that some of you have had nor am I complaining about the ID3 editing interface (right click the field, edit, boom… no having to open up a tag editing window each time), however I agree it could include more fields. I didn’t have any problems with speed or slow loading time, winamp takes around 15-20 minutes to do what songbird just did in around 2 minutes, it searched and added my entire 36 GB music database with minimal organization problems. I really like the idea behind basically having easy access to all your music stores and all your stations as well as podcasts. It also has FULL SURROUND CHANNEL SUPPORT!!! omg this is a feature that any winamp plugins or any other player for that matter seems to have problems with, the channel splitting either ends up coming out with too much distortion on each speaker or not enough power at all, songbird gets it just right. A major turnoff however for me in this early release was the fact that it does not have an equalizer (yes I’m one of those types that will sit and constantly mess with the equalizer and other factors to make the music sound just right). You have to keep in mind though that this is still just a version 0.1… so technically it’s not even in beta stages yet and just barely into being considered an alpha. Most places would grit their teeth at publicly releasing in such an early stage. Just like they say in the site… “We assure you, this is just the beginning”.
Liked: watched folders, extensions, faster to scroll thru song library than in iTunes, can switch Languages thru the Menu, integrated browser
Disliked: No EQ, No show in Windows Explorer option (like when I right click a song in iTunes), crashes when I play m4a files