How does songbird and amarok compare?

[legolas_w]

Hi
Thank you for reading my post
What does songbird does that Amarok doesnt and what is benefit of amarok over songbird?

Thanks

[neurostu]

I personally liked that songbird had the feature to query the internet for downloadable mp3s. I really liked that. However, I found songbird to be VERY buggy. It would crash every couple of minutes. Songbird is essentially just firefox skinned to be a mp3 player (imho). Its a clever concept for a media player but in reality it doesn't perform well.

Amarok is alright but I really didn't like it.

I have been using Exaile which is more inline with the Gnome interface and has worked wonderfully for me.

You might want to check out these threads:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=711483
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=714998

[crjackson]

+1 for Exaile

[herbster]

Always used amarok, can't beat it.

[LuisGMarine]

Both are good programs to use, however like most people say songbird is really buggy. It still in developing stages so there is no surprise there.

Amarok was nice, although since I have ubuntu ( gnome ) you need to download a bunch of kdelibs which I don't like, I'm the type that likes to have one solid desktop and not have bits and pieces of others in the system.

If you want to try sonbird follow the link in my signature to install it. Just to try if it you want, although I warn you that its still buggy there are things on there that just don't really allow you to do anything besides listening to music. You can really use any of the features since they are very buggy.

I'm going to give this exile a shot, I never heard of it and rhyhmbox is just too simple, it does the job well but I'm an eye-candy person and like to see a better interface then what rhythmbox has to offer.

[NCFC]

I'm putting in a strong word for Songbird. The program is much less buggy now and I haven't had any problems for quite a while, although some of the extensions will cease to work when upgrades become available.

Even though it's still not at the Version 1.0 stage, it has impressed me so much that I've uninstalled Amarok and haven't look back. To be honest, I didn't really care for Amarok, but it seemed to the number one choice for Linux. Not anymore!

Look forward to the final release. Pretty close now IMO.

[rudihawk]

+1 Exaile

Tried amarok, thought it was quite bad. Songbird was allright but nothing beats the exaile(and its only v0.2)

[Therion]

... Rhyhmbox is just too simple, it does the job well but I'm an eye-candy person ...
Poor Rhythmbox... It's rock-solid stable for me too, but it's certainly not pretty and gets passed over a lot for that very reason, I think.

Just to confuse the OP a little further I might suggest you have a look at the Listen (http://www.listen-project.org/gallery) music player.

[stchman]

Hi
Thank you for reading my post
What does songbird does that Amarok doesnt and what is benefit of amarok over songbird?

Thanks

I use Rhythmbox. It is installed by default in Ubuntu. It works very well at keeping your music organized and even works with iPods. Very well done software.

[Vadi]

I don't see them to be too comparable, as they perform different functions (songbird is a web browser-music player).

[jviscosi]

Just to confuse the OP a little further I might suggest you have a look at the Listen (http://www.listen-project.org/gallery) music player.

I like Listen a lot, though it hasn't been updated in a long time (last I looked). On my machine it unfortunately crashes downloading podcasts and also when doing Wiki lookups. It didn't used to do this so it may be that some newer version of a library it uses doesn't play nicely with it anymore.

[Superkoop]

Songbird for me!
I haven't had SB ever crash on me, (unlike amarok which crashed on loading my library the first couple times, SB didn't crash)
I had been using Songbird when I was on Windows too, so that's how I got started using that. And then when I moved to Linux, I tried other media players, and decided I preferred SB to the others just out of personal preference.
Songbird is kinda like Firefox in the reason that it needs Add-ons to make it really awesome. Like, get the Mashtape Add-on for Songbird, and you are flying high!

[neurostu]

So I guess what I've gotten out of reading this post is you should try both of them. Infact if I were you would try more then songbird and amarok, I would recommend you try atleast:
RhythmBox
XMMS
Exaile

Every system is going to be different. On my system song bird is more unstable then a 7th grade girl. But it may work for you...

[jrusso2]

Once songbird is finished it should be pretty nice but it keeps crashing on me.

[neurostu]

Perhaps, I personally think that it is going to be a bloated application. It has a lot of features that a music player doesn't need. When you open the Preferences Panel you can clearly see that it has been copied from FF. I mean why tell me WHY do you need a pop up blocker in your music player?

[jrusso2]

Perhaps, I personally think that it is going to be a bloated application. It has a lot of features that a music player doesn't need. When you open the Preferences Panel you can clearly see that it has been copied from FF. I mean why tell me WHY do you need a pop up blocker in your music player?

Maybe because it can also be used as a browser to go to the websites that the music is contained.

[neurostu]

But why not use firefox? I mean I understand what they are trying to do, but in my experience programs that focus on doing one thing really well frequently succeed and those that try to do much spread themselve too thin and rarely do anything well...

Oh well we'll see what happens to songbird... (I hope it turns out as awesome as the developers want it to be)

[j.miller565]

to be honest, I would go for AmaroK

[billgoldberg]

I've used songbird 0.4 for a while and it was great.

I don't really like amarok on gnome.

But (just as xmms) I think songbird should use gtk or atleast have a function where you can pick it instead of the default. You can't wobble the window, and I like all the applications having the same style.

I now use exaile, wich is very good.

[gashcr]

mmm, I really dislike songbird's setup... too much ituneseish for me... Anyway, no Gnome player works as well with my ipod as Amarok does, so it's my player of choice, and I don't care it couldn't match the theme... I have it in minimized to the taskbar most of the time, so no one will ever notice that :lolflag: