Over the years, iTunes has been accepted as a necessary evil between media players.
However, the open source project called Songbird, ever since its conception, has been providing some stiff competition for iTunes. In fact, most people believe that at this rate it won’t be long before it overtakes iTunes and becomes the most influential media player around.
Songbird was first released in 2006 by the creators of Mozilla Firefox, Winamp and Netscape Navigator, The Pioneers of the Inevitable. Lets a take a look at why Songbird is so highly rated by everyone.
Open Source
First and foremost, Songbird is open source software, which means that everyone can contribute something to the software. You can easily tell that it’s a good thing by taking a quick look at the official Songbird Website.
User Interface
The interface of Songbird is amazingly well done, even if plenty of the elements were copied from iTunes. The text display in the interface is small enough to display a lot of content in a single page and large enough to be read easily. The default black skin looks good to the eyes as well.
Features
Songbird has a lot of features and services integrated into it. The services include Last.fm, mash Tape, SHOUTcast Radio, and lot of customizable add-ons. Songbird even has a built in Firefox Web Browser. New add-ons can be installed directly using Songbird, or from the official add-ons website, here. Songbird is a cross platform music player and it’s available for all the major platforms: Windows, Linux and Mac. An interactive setup will ask you to add files to your library when you start Songbird for the first time. It scans the directories you specify and checks for tracks inside it.
Performance
After reading all the features available, it’s easy to understand where Songbird falls short. A music player with so many features included, along with a Mozilla Firefox Web browser, will struggle in the performance department. The resource consumption when you run an instance of Songbird and Firefox at the same time is fairly large.
Final Verdict
There are two types of people, people who like listening to music as a pastime and people who are passionate about it. If you’re of the first kind, then Songbird isn’t for you, and a low resource consuming media player like VLC, GOM will suffice. However for a passionate follower of music who likes to find out more about the latest tracks and Artists out there, then I’d recommend Songbird to them.
Also palm Pre full support is soon to arrive ;) (still has some quirks now and then).
Resources
Website | Download
The problem Linux has had
The problem Linux has had with all these apps is they fail miserably when one tries to connect an ipod and then sync podcasts.
The "freedom lovers" that hate apple and microsoft might not mind doing all the work to get podcasts on a ipod with some sort of normalized look, but for the majority of pc users we are not ready to re-invent the wheel nor do we have time to manually set up podcast downloading and syncing on the buggy products available on linux. Itunes is a resource hog and it has its drawbacks, but it works every time.
For many this is a deal breaker. Maybe this is off on a tangent, but it seems to me that linux in its current form still has some stability and ease of use issues the "average" user will not be willing to relearn.