Songbird, a nice music player

[Ric_NYC]

My opinion: :D

It has a lot of potential. It's stable.
I like its interface.
You can install "feathers" (themes), addons like Firefox.

It can display lyrics, album covers... etc.

I don't use it as web browser. I prefer Firefox, Chromium...





Cons: The LastFM plugin is not working! :(

[sydbat]

That's good. I installed it and found it...lacking...for me. Many like it better than other players, but I find it to iTuneish for my liking.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Yeh I like the new build of songbird, I like now you have the equalizer add on.
Though yeh it lacks originality in terms of interface.

[nitelite]

Songbird is too heavy, a huge resource hog. :rolleyes:

[Ric_NYC]

The interface can be changed with "feathers" or "personas"


"Description

Personas for Songbird is an extension which enables you to change the look of Songbird

The extension is not a total port from Personas for Firefox. But is based off similar functionality found in Firefox.[/B]"

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1328

[kk0sse54]

I used to love songbird and I still think it's a great media player with a lot of good features. Unfortunately it's quite a resource hog and since then I've discovered the joys of using mpd+ncmpcpp :)

[northwestuntu]

I used to love songbird and I still think it's a great media player with a lot of good features. Unfortunately it's quite a resource hog and since then I've discovered the joys of using mpd+ncmpcpp :)

what is mdp?

[northwestuntu]

Songbird is too heavy, a huge resource hog. :rolleyes:

yes that is a big problem, but love everything else.

[Greg]

what is mdp?

mpd is the music player daemon. It runs in the background when you start up. A database of your music is created. ncmpcpp is one of many frontends to it so you can control what's going on, but you don't need a client open for it to play- if you close it, it keeps playing. If you kill X, it keeps playing. If you shut down, it resumes playing as soon as you boot up again.

It's also very lightweight. ncmpcpp is a terminal ncurses application to control it, while at the same time being very featureful- browsing, lyrics meta-data retrieving, and more.

[koleoptero]

I loved songbird with the lyrics addon and its interface, but it was not very responsive in my laptop. So exaile for now.

Does ncmpcpp+mpd have an equalizer? Does any terminal based music app? I'm really curious cause I've been using cmus often, but not having an equalizer rules it out of being my main music player...

[Greg]

I loved songbird with the lyrics addon and its interface, but it was not very responsive in my laptop. So exaile for now.

Does ncmpcpp+mpd have an equalizer? Does any terminal based music app? I'm really curious cause I've been using cmus often, but not having an equalizer rules it out of being my main music player...

If you use alsa, there's alsaequal, and if your output goes through that then it controls it, I believe.

[koleoptero]

If you use alsa, there's alsaequal, and if your output goes through that then it controls it, I believe.

No I use pulse as it comes default with Jaunty. I tried to revert to alsa but didn't like the results. Besides I wouldn't want to apply an equalizer to all sounds (I assume that that's what alsaequal does).

[SuperSonic4]

I prefer exaile to songbird, I find songbird to be too clunky and too much like firefox. I have firefox installed - I don't want it again

[pwnst*r]

My opinion: :D

It has a lot of potential. It's stable.
I like its interface.
You can install "feathers" (themes), addons like Firefox.

It can display lyrics, album covers... etc.

I don't use it as web browser. I prefer Firefox, Chromium...





Cons: The LastFM plugin is not working! :(

welcome to 2007! (06 if you want to include that horrible mess)

[Vakman]

I like Songbird, I use it on Windows. But when I am on Linux, I would much rather use Banshee. Just a personal choice, Songbird is really great though. I find it a little on the slow end at times though.

[HappinessNow]

That's good. I installed it and found it...lacking...for me. Many like it better than other players, but I find it to iTuneish for my liking.


Songbird is too heavy, a huge resource hog. :rolleyes:

lacking + bloat = Not a good combination.

[RiceMonster]

Hmmm. I may try it again, though I'm really liking Amarok 2. It seems nice that it's got an equalizer, but I don't like iTunes style players and I'm not sure about the whole browser + player thing.

[Viva]

Rhythmbox is more than enough for my needs. I'll give songbird a try though.

[Gen2ly]

Tried songbird once. Just wasn't that responsive. Not sure that using a web browser for everything is the way to go.

[Dobbie03]

Rhythmbox is more than enough for my needs. I'll give songbird a try though.

+1.

I used to use Songbird. I do prefer Rhythmbox by a long shot.

[khelben1979]

Songbird is too heavy, a huge resource hog. :rolleyes:

Agreed. The radio stations it has makes it worth using in my opinion, but if I'm going to watch movies on YouTube, I'm forced to close it down first.

[Johnsie]

I don't bother storing music on my computer anymore, I use Spotify. That means I can access my music playlists from almost any computer wherever I go.

Songbird is quite heavy for a media player that doesn't even do video or play cds. I don't understand why modern media players need to be such bloated resource hogs. All they need to to is list songs and play them. I could do that on my 486, so why in 2009 on much more powerful hardware are they still really clunky?

[mrgnash]

It's far too heavy for me... Though I have recommended it to a lot of people (especially Windows users with iPods and the like), I personally prefer my humble little cmus :)

[koleoptero]

Now that the equalizer gstreamer plugin has been moved to gstreamer-good, I hope to see a rhythmbox equaliser soon.

[graabein]

Quod Libet über alles!! Songbird is no good.

[cak3]

I keep switching. I primarily use banshee and songbird atm. I like banshee better, it's interface, etc, but there are certain things I require of a media player due to my own and my music library's peculiarities. The primary thing is displaying and browsing by album-artist (as opposed to song artist, which is the default artist tag). Songbird can do that, and, more-so, it can organize my library using album artist as the folder. (I do like the library management feature, it's useful when I need to look into my rather sizable library within the file-system). Granted, Banshee can do that too, but there are two major sticking points keeping me from banshee as my main media player. That is the fact that the browser is hardcoded to list by artist (the side pane browser, the list itself does have an album-artist column if you want it to). Since I have some songs on the same album tagged with different artists, but one album artist, listing by artist splits albums. =(

The other problem I have with banshee is the fact that is not not have lookahead (often provided by teh gtk widget in other programs). By this I mean, I can't type "r" and have it jump to things starting with r. I have a pretty damn big library, so thats pretty convienent.

This post turned out to be way longer than I planned, especially since I just landed here seeings if I could find anything out about fonts and hinting in songbird, since the font rendering seems just a bit off.

[lobonegro.rlopez]

I can't wait til it gets CD support, I love Songbird, but I hate having to rip my CD's in Rhythmbox.