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View Full Version : Will Songbird replace Rhythmbox one day? :D



wersdaluv
April 8th, 2008, 12:59 PM
Ubuntu and many other distros have Firefox instead of Epiphany. There's a great media player that's being developed now, Songbird (http://songbirdnest.com). It looks nice but will it be good enough to be Ubuntu's default media player by default one day?

I know that we can't say for sure and it's hard to deviate from GNOME's default, but do you think that Songbird is really promising? :)

Edward Nigma
April 8th, 2008, 01:02 PM
Ubuntu and many other distros have Firefox instead of Epiphany. There's a great media player that's being developed now, Songbird (http://songbirdnest.com). It looks nice but will it be good enough to be Ubuntu's default media player by default one day?

I know that we can't say for sure and it's hard to deviate from GNOME's default, but do you think that Songbird is really promising? :)

I'll be honest with you. Songbird looks absolutely awesome. It has that polished impressive look that the likes of itunes has going for it and many GTK apps lack. I'll definitely be giving it a try.

MRiGnS
April 8th, 2008, 01:02 PM
We're rather going to see banshee as its replacement imho.

Sef
April 8th, 2008, 01:03 PM
Well it is still beta, so no chance now of getting in. In the future once it is stable, maybe.

aeiah
April 8th, 2008, 01:13 PM
ubuntu wont ever put songbird in by default i dont think, and this has nothing to do with how good or bad songbird is, and much more to do with gnome. ubuntu and kubuntu both try to include applications that display using the gnome or kde environments respectivley, so create a unified look. you're much more likely to see banshee or exaile as a replacement in a default ubuntu than songbird because of this.

i personally like exaile

drascus
April 8th, 2008, 01:43 PM
Well there is also the qustion of licenses too. because it uses a good deal of Mozilla and has some non-free licenses its more likely ubuntu will stay with as much totally Free-Software as possible.

geoken
April 8th, 2008, 01:57 PM
We're rather going to see banshee as its replacement imho.

Maybe a bit off topic, but can someone give a short Banshee vs. Rhythmbox comparison. I've never used banshee extensively, but from my breif usage of it I couldn't really find anything that differentiated it from RhythmBox.

geoken
April 8th, 2008, 02:01 PM
I agree with aeiah. Songbird should at least use your default window decorations. It would be nice for them to fully utilize your GTK theme, but in the absence of that, dropping it's custom window decorations would go a long way. Ideally, there could be an option to use their skinned interface or to use your current GTK theme.

aeiah
April 8th, 2008, 02:07 PM
Well there is also the qustion of licenses too. because it uses a good deal of Mozilla and has some non-free licenses its more likely ubuntu will stay with as much totally Free-Software as possible.

songbird is GPL according to its wiki. it uses gstreamer for its media playing and so is only non-free if your gstreamer is non-free.

i think its more to do with look and feel

23meg
April 8th, 2008, 02:11 PM
it's hard to deviate from GNOME's default,

Rhythmbox isn't GNOME's default.

swoll1980
April 8th, 2008, 02:15 PM
songbird is a slow bloated mess why does my media player need to have a browser built into it. On top of that it doesn't play videos. linux needs a media player that has a media library function like wmp. The media players for linux have one or the other. Apps like amarok that have a great library function don't play video. Apps that play video like vlc have no library funtion. you can plug playlist into them but you can't organize files edit tags or anything like that. and the gnome apps don't even have an eq. When I learn enough about programing to actually do anything useful this will be the first thing I fix.

TeraDyne
April 8th, 2008, 02:37 PM
I second swoll1980's comments on Songbird being a bloated mess. It bogs down my 1GB system, while Rhythmbox doesn't. Unless they can lower the memory needed for it to work, I don't think it's going to become mainstream. Then again, people loved firefox when it was a slow, buggy mess... >_>;

DarkOx
April 8th, 2008, 03:09 PM
Maybe a bit off topic, but can someone give a short Banshee vs. Rhythmbox comparison. I've never used banshee extensively, but from my breif usage of it I couldn't really find anything that differentiated it from RhythmBox.

Honestly, the current version of banshee you find in the repos is basically the same as rhythmbox. However, development of banshee is coming along very quickly, and it looks like the 1.0 version will have some differences, such as:

Video support
An album browser, complete with album artwork
Sound equalizer
Burn CDs (older versions of banshee could do this too)

It'll also gain last.fm support, like rhythmbox has now. All in all, I'd say banshee's shaping up to be the best music manager Gnome has to offer.

sefs
April 8th, 2008, 03:23 PM
I can't get song bird to work with either alltray or kdocker.

MRiGnS
April 8th, 2008, 03:25 PM
Maybe a bit off topic, but can someone give a short Banshee vs. Rhythmbox comparison. I've never used banshee extensively, but from my breif usage of it I couldn't really find anything that differentiated it from RhythmBox.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~banshee-team/+archive

There are repos for the alpha of the new banshee. maybe you want to give it a try.

wersdaluv
April 8th, 2008, 03:43 PM
Let's see what happens when the stable release is out. :)

wersdaluv
April 8th, 2008, 03:44 PM
Rhythmbox isn't GNOME's default.

Really? What is??

23meg
April 8th, 2008, 03:45 PM
Totem.

Therion
April 8th, 2008, 03:49 PM
+1 on Songbird being a veritable disaster of bloatware. I love poor, ugly, little Rhythmbox; so simple, so stable yet it gets no respect.

That being said I think Exaile (http://www.exaile.org/screens) is the new GTK hotness, baby.

Album cover support, iPod plugin, built-in SHOUTcast directory, tabbed playlists... Oh yeah.

bigbrovar
April 8th, 2008, 04:20 PM
I love poor, ugly, little Rhythmbox; so simple, so stable yet it gets no respect.

+1

TeraDyne
April 8th, 2008, 04:56 PM
I love poor, ugly, little Rhythmbox; so simple, so stable yet it gets no respect.

I love it as well. I don't mind losing eye candy so long as it functions in the way I want it to... which it does.

swoll1980
April 8th, 2008, 05:01 PM
I love it as well. I don't mind losing eye candy so long as it functions in the way I want it to... which it does.

if it had a eq and a video player it would be great

TeraDyne
April 8th, 2008, 05:07 PM
if it had a eq and a video player it would be great

As far as I can tell It's not meant to be an all-in-one like WMP. That's Totem's job. Rhythmbox is more of an audio jukebox, much like how iTunes was before adding a video player.

Honestly, though, an equalizer would be nice.

amazingtaters
April 8th, 2008, 05:37 PM
I could see banshee coming to the forefront and taking rythmbox's place. The new 1.0 Alphas are pretty awesome.

aeiah
April 8th, 2008, 05:56 PM
i sure hope exaile doesnt start thinking about incorporating a video player. gah. how many videos do people have seriously? i have quite a few, but i only really watch them once or twice. i guess ive got over 200, but still, i dont need a media player to put them in categories, i just open the folder with nautilus, double click, and mplayer shoots into fullscreen with all the tweaks i want.

the_darkside_986
April 8th, 2008, 06:02 PM
Anything that can play the small Example ogg vorbis files without stuttering badly (pointing at Totem) would make a good replacement regardless of look and feel. My friend has an iPod and Banshee was the only thing that made it usable in Ubuntu. But Banshee, being written with C# and Mono would not be a good default. Mono on Ubuntu is always highly outdated and the mono developers seem to really dislike Ubuntu/Debian. Why else would the developers have a package for nearly every distro except Ubuntu? (The binary installer is unsuitable and WILL cause breakage, believe me.)

FuturePilot
April 8th, 2008, 06:08 PM
Songbird is too heavy for me. I'd rather see Banshee.

ghindo
April 8th, 2008, 06:30 PM
Rhythmbox does what it does just fine. I see no reason to replace it.

SomeGuyDude
April 8th, 2008, 06:30 PM
I love it as well. I don't mind losing eye candy so long as it functions in the way I want it to... which it does.

Get you some Sonata + MPD. Smooth GTK integration, full-featured, light on the resources.

CarpKing
April 8th, 2008, 07:31 PM
I really like Rhythmbox. I don't think it needs a video player (and definitely not a web browser), but it might be nice if it kept a video library, from which you could launch your videos in Totem (or perhaps the player of your choice). Also the default layout could use some work.

macogw
April 8th, 2008, 08:13 PM
It'd need some work first...like support for album art...and understanding that it doesn't need to download all parts of a podcast every time after you've already told it you don't want that day's recording.

And Rhythmbox isn't ugly. That's your GTK theme :P

Therion
April 8th, 2008, 08:23 PM
I love poor, ugly, little Rhythmbox; so simple, so stable yet it gets no respect.
I love it as well. I don't mind losing eye candy so long as it functions in the way I want it to... which it does.
Exactly. The thing I like about Rhythmbox is it's lack of bells and whistles. I pull it up, click "shuffle", turn off my monitor and Rhythmbox just goes and goes. I'm not looking for album art, and I'm not going to be fiddling with an EQ; I want it to play my damn music whilst I go about doing other things.

That being said, Exaile really IS damn sexy by comparison.

And if I want to watch a video, I'd rather pull up an application that was designed to work with video. I'm a fan of the right tool for the right job.


And Rhythmbox isn't ugly. That's your GTK theme :P
Girlfriend, you can dress it up any way you want but let's be honest... Poor little Rhythmbox done got whacked up hard with the ugly stick.

igknighted
April 8th, 2008, 08:31 PM
I don't mind having rhythmbox as default. Sure it isn't flashy, but it works. For me, I used Banshee and LOVE it, but I understand that there are reasons people don't want mono apps installed as default, and I really don't find it difficult to install after the fact, so I couldn't care less if it is the default.

z0mbie
April 8th, 2008, 08:36 PM
Isn't Songbird more bulkier than Rhythmbox ? I donno about everyone, but I like my applications to use as less resources possible.

macogw
April 8th, 2008, 09:50 PM
Girlfriend, you can dress it up any way you want but let's be honest... Poor little Rhythmbox done got whacked up hard with the ugly stick.

Huh? It can't possibly look any better or worse than your GTK theme...and therefore the rest of your apps. It's a GNOME app and matches the rest of them.

geoken
April 8th, 2008, 11:11 PM
I don't mind having rhythmbox as default. Sure it isn't flashy, but it works. For me, I used Banshee and LOVE it,

So I installed and tried out the new banshee 1 alpha and I feel like I'm on crazy pills.

They look almost identical to my eyes. Sure there are small differences, but I don't think I'd call one drab and the other flashy.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y169/geoken/b2b.jpg

Therion
April 8th, 2008, 11:20 PM
Huh? It can't possibly look any better or worse than your GTK theme...and therefore the rest of your apps. It's a GNOME app and matches the rest of them.
In this corner, the loveable, if butt-@ass ugly Rhythmbox: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/Baphomet/rhythmbox-main.png

And in this corner, the new hawtness that IS, Exaile: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/Baphomet/Exaile.png


Props to Google Image Search (no, my name is not Jason).

mrgnash
April 8th, 2008, 11:23 PM
Doubtful. Banshee is a much more likely candidate. Hell, Elisa stands a better chance. Songbird just has too many fundamental shortcomings.

swoll1980
April 8th, 2008, 11:53 PM
I don't think mines ugly at all

wersdaluv
April 9th, 2008, 02:05 AM
My default media player is Rhythmbox. Tried Banshee, but I don't like it because it's too heavy.

I'm trying Exaile now. I find it nice because it seems to be faster than my Rhythmbox install (I don't know why) and it has a lot more features. The equalizer is an important one. What I don't like about Exaile is how it deviate's from GNOME's standards. The artwork doesn't comply with Tango and since it aims to be like Amarok, it follows some KDE principles like having an "Apply" button. I don't like that. Well, I can settle with it because it doesn't have the multimedia volume button bug (when Rhythmbox is the active window, metacity hangs when you adjust the volume with multimedia keys).

I want to hear opinions on people foresee the future of Songbird. Will it really be "the firefox of media players"? Though, right now, I don't like it. I don't even run it in my productive sessions because it slows my computer down because it has too many unnecessary features. Let's see what happens on the first stable release. Maybe, they'll make it "true gtk" like Firefox 3 and it will be more resource-efficient one day.

igknighted
April 9th, 2008, 02:16 AM
So I installed and tried out the new banshee 1 alpha and I feel like I'm on crazy pills.

They look almost identical to my eyes. Sure there are small differences, but I don't think I'd call one drab and the other flashy.

Feature wise, and simplicity wise, banshee is a little better. Its a lot of trivial things, but it just feels like banshee was designed by people who listen to a lot of music. For example, it (like amarok) defaults to closing the window while leaving the application open, which rhythmbox doesn't seem to want to do. There are plenty of little things like that which just work better in Banshee.

I have not touched the alpha yet, so the only comment I will make is... it's alpha. They are busy implementing features, not fitting them nicely into the UI. Banshee from the repo's is a far sight nicer than Rhythmbox tho.

geoken
April 9th, 2008, 03:31 AM
Feature wise, and simplicity wise, banshee is a little better. Its a lot of trivial things, but it just feels like banshee was designed by people who listen to a lot of music. For example, it (like amarok) defaults to closing the window while leaving the application open, which rhythmbox doesn't seem to want to do. There are plenty of little things like that which just work better in Banshee.



I guess as usual it comes down to the little things. For me, rhythmBox is better because of it's handling of radio (I probably spend 30% of my time on shoutcast streams, 20% with lastFM and the rest with local content).

I also require the ability to save playlists externally (so i can transfer them to my Mp3 players 'playlist' folder), I had difficulty with this last time I tried Banshee.

Also, as you probably noticed from my screen shot, 99% of my music has no album art so any strengths banshee may have in that department are lost on me.

geoken
April 9th, 2008, 03:42 AM
I want to hear opinions on people foresee the future of Songbird. Will it really be "the firefox of media players"? Though, right now, I don't like it. I don't even run it in my productive sessions because it slows my computer down because it has too many unnecessary features. Let's see what happens on the first stable release. Maybe, they'll make it "true gtk" like Firefox 3 and it will be more resource-efficient one day.

That's my hope as well. I'd probably seriously think about adopting Thunderbird and Songbird if they followed the lead of Firefox 3 and used GTK widgets in their apps. The biggest thing that kept me from Thunderbird was the ugly Win2K style widgets it uses for things like list view header bars and seperators.

ctyc
April 9th, 2008, 03:53 AM
a bit off topic but StreamTuner is no longer in active development...sigh!

Skerit
April 10th, 2008, 04:08 PM
I just hate the way Banshee always changes the "active playlist" to the playlist you're currently browsing!

I always thought it looked cool, but that was such an annoying "feature" - I see it's fixed in this new version.

Hmm, now I won't be able to choose between Exaile or the new Banshee version!
Both have flaws I cannot get past, even though Banshee's new video feature is nice (I always wanted to collect my videoclips besides my music files) it almost has no settings to tweak, no preferences to set. And no lyrics!

DigitalDuality
April 10th, 2008, 08:51 PM
Only if songbird functioned as well as it looks. A crap applicaiton with a shiny look to it. It's a memory hog.

Personally i hope rythmbox is done away with entirely. Banshee, Amarok, Exhaile, and Listen all blow it out of the water.

emoruffino
April 10th, 2008, 10:04 PM
ive been using songbird since .2 :p

i love it. better then anything i can think of right now. lol

uknowho008
April 10th, 2008, 10:12 PM
ooohhh.... that looks nice. i dont like any of the linux media players ive used to far. this one looks promising to me. though i dont really like itunes. i prefer wmp. but still.

Foster Grant
April 11th, 2008, 05:51 AM
Ubuntu and many other distros have Firefox instead of Epiphany. There's a great media player that's being developed now, Songbird (http://songbirdnest.com). It looks nice but will it be good enough to be Ubuntu's default media player by default one day?

I know that we can't say for sure and it's hard to deviate from GNOME's default, but do you think that Songbird is really promising? :)

It is promising, but it can't rip CDs yet and it's still very glaringly beta.

I switched back to Amarok — the only K app I use.

billgoldberg
April 11th, 2008, 08:36 AM
Ubuntu and many other distros have Firefox instead of Epiphany. There's a great media player that's being developed now, Songbird (http://songbirdnest.com). It looks nice but will it be good enough to be Ubuntu's default media player by default one day?

I know that we can't say for sure and it's hard to deviate from GNOME's default, but do you think that Songbird is really promising? :)

I like it, but it needs to be gtk, they use their own now and I don't like that.

For instance, you can't wobble the windows. And I use a theme for a reason, everything needs to look the same.

That's why I don't use songbird anymore.

And the thing about rythmbox being ugly isn't true at all. It looks the same as all other gnome apps -> beautiful

graabein
April 11th, 2008, 09:14 AM
I've tried Banshee and Rythmbox but to me the best player is Quod Libet. Album view, musicbrainz lookup (for tags), download cover art from the net. It's great. Not heavy at all.

Fits in with how I play music namely one album at a time. I have not tried the iPod support though. Banshee is my second choice.

imT
April 11th, 2008, 01:59 PM
as soon it gets out of beta i'm gonna be a songbird user :)

GoCool
April 11th, 2008, 02:23 PM
I have the following requirment, does any music player satisfies it. Please let me know.

1.It should have cross fade option (Rhythmbox has it, but Banshee doesnt have)

2.In the play list it should be able to loop (repeat) just one song (Rhythmbox doesnt but Banshee does)

3. It should allow me to put multiple copies of the same song in the play list (Rhythm box doesnt, but Banshee does)

4. I should be able to sort the play list by Artist or Album or Play count etc (Rhythmbox doesnt, but Banshee does)

5. In the play list I should be able to rate the song by giving stars as well as write comments. (Both allows ratings but doesnt allow to write our own comments, like iTunes)

Please let me know if there is any other music juke box there which will give all the above capabilities, I am not much into artwork and visualizations etc.

macogw
April 12th, 2008, 01:06 AM
In this corner, the loveable, if butt-@ass ugly Rhythmbox: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/Baphomet/rhythmbox-main.png

And in this corner, the new hawtness that IS, Exaile: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/Baphomet/Exaile.png


Props to Google Image Search (no, my name is not Jason).

Those aren't with the same GTK theme. The Exaile one's done with a nicer GTK theme is all. And I can't stand those vertical tabs on Exaile. Amarok's got that too. When I used Exaile (because I didn't know Rhythmbox had ceased to suck), I used one of their rearrange-everything themes to get rid of it.

SomeGuyDude
April 12th, 2008, 01:30 AM
I've tried Banshee and Rythmbox but to me the best player is Quod Libet. Album view, musicbrainz lookup (for tags), download cover art from the net. It's great. Not heavy at all.

Fits in with how I play music namely one album at a time. I have not tried the iPod support though. Banshee is my second choice.

Very nice player. Would be better if it played nice with Conky. :mad:

MikeyMike01
April 12th, 2008, 01:36 AM
Personally, I don't see why it matter what they make the default. It took me under a minute to uninstall Evolution and install ThunderBird.

ubuntu-freak
April 12th, 2008, 04:34 AM
Wow....it certainly looks bang-tidy! Got me some testing to do....

I'm surprised some of you are dismissing it already for being slow - the Songbird devs give warning that it's buggy and it can only get better anyway. Certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Nathan

wersdaluv
April 12th, 2008, 04:06 PM
Personally, I don't see why it matter what they make the default. It took me under a minute to uninstall Evolution and install ThunderBird.

Default's an Issue. What if Epiphany's default instead of Firefox? What if, Thunar is default instead of Nautilus?

AndyCooll
April 12th, 2008, 04:43 PM
Personally, I don't see why it matter what they make the default. It took me under a minute to uninstall Evolution and install ThunderBird.
Sure, it doesn't take long ...but you're assuming folk are aware of what alternative apps are available and that they know how to install them. You and I might know, but many don't.

So, as wersdaluv says it is a big issue since the tendency for most users (and certainly newbies) is to use whatever is the default app.

:cool:

screaminj3sus
February 23rd, 2009, 07:49 AM
songbird is reall slowand its ui doesnt fit in with gnome/kde/windows/osx at all.

edit: epic fail on myself for not looking at date of this thread :/

dmizer
February 23rd, 2009, 08:24 AM
Let's let this one rest in peace.

Thank you :)