Songbird is Awesome!

[moclippa]

For those of you still not aware, the developer preview is out already.

You can either go to the site www.songbirdnest.com and download the .tar over there, or follow aysiu's instructions and use the script he/she(?) has up over here (http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/songbird).

Sorry if this sounds like a repost, but I'm quite hopeful about this project, and really want to see it pick up the exposure it should be getting.

I posted this on community forums because I did not post the script originally, so was hoping to get a bit of discussion on the pro's and cons of his sort of software, rather then this be a how-to.

[Pobega]

Looks pretty nice, I'll have to look into it when I have got some time to kill.

[lwr]

I got pretty excited about this when I first saw it. A lot of people who might switch to Linux are put off by unfarmiliar media players, so to have a cross platform open-source project like this is great. Hopefully it'll do for multimedia what Firefox has done for the internet. I don't think it's very useable right now, though, as there are still a lot of bugs. Other disadvantages of using it on Linux that I've found is that you can't minimize it to the systray, and it makes no attempt to blend in with the OS, which also means that most Beryl/Compiz effects don't work. Still, it's definitely a project I'll be watching closely.

[Kateikyoushi]

That's a piece of art, beautiful, a pity most of our songs are in itunes. I keep an eye on it and definitely give it a try when I make our linux htpc from the ps3.

[mykalreborn]

i allways thought songbird is awsome. but it's a pitty they are still in beta version, since a lot of the features don't work. but when they do finish it i guess it's going to be one of the most popular.

[Tomosaur]

I really like songbird too, it looks absolutely beatiful.

[moclippa]

Aside from looks, its somewhat relatively stable enough right now... I'm enjoying it enough that I've made it my primary player, which says a lot for something thats still at version .2... or says a bit about the competition out there for a linux multimedia player. As a windows convert over a year ago I never could get used to players like XMMS, Amorak or Banshee, something about them felt dated and disorganized.

Anyways one feature I've particularly been playing around with since I started messing with Songbird is surfing webpages (songbirds bookmarked a ton of ones that apply) that have mp3s on them, and having a small playlist automatically generate at the bottom of the player of all mp3s on the page. Quality is great, songs are full length, and a lot of these pages have a great variety of up and coming acts that we've all probably never heard of, but are quite top notch.

Haven't had a crash just yet, but waiting for it in Gnome (I tried this in e17 and though it integrated better with the desktop, the unstable window manager and development version of the program combined to a slow and crash prone state)

Ipod seems to be functional, you need to get an extension to use it simply by using your Songbird browser, heading to their homepage and finding the extension on site. After that its just like installing a firefox extension.

[moclippa]

Oh great, it not only highlights all mp3s on the webpage, but gives you the option to download them! Love having this program make that process simpler.

Still trying to figure out if its downloading the stream or if they are actually free for download mp3s.

[ComplexNumber]

songbird? awesome? i failed to see the connection when i used it. i found it to be unintuitive, and the interface is AWFUL. that black really is NOT easy on the eye at all! ](*,). it reminds me too much of the ugliness of Lmms

[Kernel Sanders]

I'll give it a try when they hit 1.0

It looks promising though :cool:

[Johnsie]

It's a nice program.... But I've had it for months now and they haven't upgraded it or released a new version the whole time. What's going on?

[Arathorn]

I tried this program some time ago... the horror.:-#

[Kernel Sanders]

It's a nice program.... But I've had it for months now and they haven't upgraded it or released a new version the whole time. What's going on?

Really? Thats a shame :(

[marcus2004]

Well thanks OP I went to the webpage and played the introduction video which shows all the excellent features. My girlfriend overheard and asked if it was on windoze as well. So she is going to use it on hers and I am using it on my pc. So far I really like it.

[Kayne]

From the Songbirdnest blog (submitted 5 days ago):

We've been pretty quiet lately, partially due to the holidays and people being out of town visiting relatives and such. But also because we've been working hard to clean up and solidify our architecture so that we are in a good position to move forward as quickly as possible.(...)
For my part I've been looking closely at adding tabbed browsing to the bird, and creating an API that websites can use to talk to the bird. It's pretty exciting stuff as far as I'm concerned (as is most of the work we have slated for the next release). On top of that I have a couple of other tasks on my plate: build farm, for nightly releases; and unit testing, which we will be leveraging some of the capabilities of XULRunner to implement.

I'd love Songbird to claim the top for it's own but for me it isn't useful yet since Songbird really is slow with a +10000 songs library. I still mainly use iTunes in Windows, which flies despite the large library. But I HATE the fact that it doesn't play FLAC. In Ubuntu I use Banshee but like Songbird it also lacks the speed, which becomes unbearable over time.

I hope that in 2007 we will see a lively Songbird 1.0 and kicking the butts out there.

[Mateo]

too bad it's a resource hog.

[spockrock]

. that black really is NOT easy on the eye at all!

it come with a white feather as well, thats what I use it looked great....


I'd love Songbird to claim the top for it's own but for me it isn't useful yet since Songbird really is slow with a +10000 songs library. I still mainly use iTunes in Windows, which flies despite the large library. But I HATE the fact that it doesn't play FLAC. In Ubuntu I use Banshee but like Songbird it also lacks the speed, which becomes unbearable over time.

I hope that in 2007 we will see a lively Songbird 1.0 and kicking the butts out there.

ugh iTunes is worse for a 10 000+ library, the only music applications that handles my music 30K music collection are, is; foobar2000 and amarok.

simply put two best music players out there.

[daz4126]

Can Songbird sync ipods? If so, how do you do it, I had my nano plugged in and couldn't find it anywhere.

cheers,

DAZ

[spockrock]

http://windjay.com/ipodsupport.html

go there for the extension.

[Kernel Sanders]

too bad it's a resource hog.

Its a developer preview? Now is the time to judge potential, not its current state ](*,)

Maybe we should judge Feisty Fawn by the quality of the current build too eh? :rolleyes:

[Rackerz]

I liked it, but it was a resource hog, it didn't minimize to the tray either :/. It handled my big library though.

[pmj]

It doesn't seem like Songbird does anything useful that other players, even Rhythmbox, doesn't already do, unless you really need to "play web pages as playlists", whatever that is. And it sure is amazingly ugly. I don't want theme support, I want it to look just like all my other Gnome apps.

[Kayne]

ugh iTunes is worse for a 10 000+ library
I don't know how you define "worse" but when I enter something for search I get instant results as I type it in.
In contrast, most other players in Linux, including Amarok, often like to sit around for 10 or more seconds (or crash now and then) while raping my harddrive and yes, I tried mysql as well. Maybe it's because the files are on a ntfs volume but I can't move my entire collection to a linux fs to check it out.

[ComplexNumber]

It doesn't seem like Songbird does anything useful that other players, even Rhythmbox, doesn't already do, unless you really need to "play web pages as playlists", whatever that is. And it sure is amazingly ugly. I don't want theme support, I want it to look just like all my other Gnome apps.
i was wondering that too. its about 52MB, yet it doesn't seem to offer me anything more than 'conventional' media players. being black(or white, as someone noted earlier) makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

[spockrock]

I don't know how you define "worse" but when I enter something for search I get instant results as I type it in.
In contrast, most other players in Linux, including Amarok, often like to sit around for 10 or more seconds (or crash now and then) while raping my harddrive and yes, I tried mysql as well. Maybe it's because the files are on a ntfs volume but I can't move my entire collection to a linux fs to check it out.

wow, you are lucky because itunes has pretty much been a huge resource hog, and cannot handle large databases at all. I dunno what to say about amarok is that it always has been snappy for me, then only time it takes a while is when I accidently load all 30K songs into the playlist... :s it doesn't like that, lol...looks like our itunes and amarok experiences are reversed.