I take a lot of flack at work for being a Mac user and using mostly all Apple products to compute, listen to music, and manage my media. I had tried out Songbird quite a while back in the early beta days and I just never could get used to it. Well, the developers have released version 1.0 and guess what!? Nothing has changed. I still can’t peal myself away from the slickness of iTunes’ media management and overall experience. You want examples? They are after the fold.
The things I like about Songbird: Why I WANT to leave iTunes
Songbird is based off the Firefox engine.
I love that this music player is a module application that users can create plugins, add-ons, and tweaks for. It also has a full web-browser that will create play lists if the site contains media files. There is also the use of the ‘about:config’ section. I’m a big fan of Firefox’s tweaking system and to have this in my music player would be great.
Plugin City.
As I said above, you can install add-ons that allow you to increase the functionality and sex appeal of your media player. Some of my favorites so far have been the seamless Last.FM integration, Feathers (skins), iTunes Library sync, and FairPlay support. Something I wish I could get out of this…Amazon Music Store integration. Just saying.
Syncronization with iTunes libarary.
So I haven’t fully commited to this Songbird thing yet and it’s a good thing. However, in the mean time, Songbird always checks my iTunes library to see if I have added any new songs. It then updates it’s own list and I have all my media still. This is great and allows me to keep it installed on my computer and hopefully come back to it when there are some updates.
Things I don’t like about Songbird: The list is long and distinguished
iPod integration.
It flat out doesn’t work. I’ve installed the iPod Device Support plugin, and after reading through PAGES of responses that this doesn’t work I landed on one that stats, ‘The developer of this plugin obviously doesn’t read this. Nothing is being done.’ This is the main thing that is keeping me from using this as my daily media manager. If it doesn’t sync with an iPod, I simply cannot use this.
Podcast RSS.
While a search in Songbird’s plugin list doesn’t not contain a podcast management page, you can ‘subscribe’ to an RSS feed in your library list. The good thing is most sites like Revision 3, Twit.TV, and other media outlets provide RSS feeds for their podcasts. The bad thing is that if you subscribe, even if you kill the download for the previous episodes, a libarary entry is made for that episode. Case in point, I put in TWiT’s RSS feed and was caught up except for the most recent episode. When I went to my Smart Playlist of recently added media, all the episodes I didn’t download were listed. Kind of annoying.
Memory footprint.
I have enough memory to run this program, but if I’m going to listen to music, I’m usually running Photoshop, Flash, querying MySQL databases and running a virtual machine for browser testing. The memory footprint of iTunes, while watching a video podcast on my MacBook Pro is 80MB (including the iTunes Helper Application). When viewing Songbird’s memory consumption while not doing anything, with a library open, not playing, and no extra tabs open, 169.18MB. It’s the Windows Vista of media players.
My final thoughts:
While I welcome the use of open source based software and love the Mozilla backend, I just with this application was more streamlined and there was more development going into some of the add-ons. I also think that if you are going to be a media player, you have to support mp3 players out of the box. I’m thinking this might be a reverse engineering issue with iPods, but from what I can tell, there is none out of the box. I’m going to keep my eyes on Songbird’s future releases and hope to bring you a post later that is titled, ‘Why I switched to Songbrid!’ Until then, rock on with iTunes.
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