Songbird 1.0 official release

If you are like me, you have bumped into the limitations of iTunes on more than one occasion. Whether it be the ability to have the program organize your music folder the way you want it to, or managing and converting different types of audio files. Songbird 1.0 may just be the answer to this dilemma. I have tried previous beta releases from about a year ago, and as recently as a few months ago. At that time, the program left a lot to be desired, and had a lot of bugs. Now, with the first full release, word is that most of these bugs have been fixed, which leaves us with a potential iTunes killer app. This is especially good news since finding an iTunes replacement that functions across platforms is a challenge; Thankfully, Songbird 1.0 is available on Windows/Linux/Mac for free since it is a open source project. Being based on the Mozilla platform, it is fully extensible and customizable, just like FireFox. When I was using Windows, MediaMonkey was a very good substitute for iTunes, and allowed me to manage my iPod to a greater extent than iTunes did; Songbird promises to do the same. Hope it can live up to that promise, because I am VERY sick of being tethered to iTunes on my Mac. Download it and try it, I know I'm going to. Check out this Lifehacker article for more info.


12.3.08 @ 10:24PM GMT
Since the above post, I have had the chance to download and try out Songbird. I have to say, I like it, but there is still much to be desired. One thing that I have encountered, and am keeping an eye on is the fact that the wrong artwork and info is being displayed for the currently playing song. I seem to remember one of the beta versions messing up my album art as well....It seems that the problem is the shuffle button, when it is pressed, the album art and the info displayed when changing tracks is shuffled, but the song that actually plays is just the next one on the now playing list. If you turn shuffle off, then the correct info and artwork is displayed when you skip ahead. Strange, and annoying. The interface is a bit sluggish, and unresponsive at times. Several times I have tried to use the scrolling motion on my laptop's trackpad, and it hasn't worked. Also, the actual scroll bar in the application itself has failed to work on a couple occasions. There is no scan/rescan feature, instead, if you scan a folder that has already been added, then rescan it (say there are some new files in the folder,) you end up with duplicate files in the library. Very frustrating. MediaMonkey had a "folder monitor" utility that actively monitored folders of your choosing, and kept track of when new files were added to said folders, It was also capable of locating moved/missing tracks, something which Songbird can't do.

On the upside, I like the fact that it is both a web browser and a media player. I am typing this right now from inside Songbird while listening to some tunes. All the media controls are right here, as well as access to my entire music library. No need to switch between apps. I also like the mashTape add-on, which displays information about the currently playing artist, pics, links to the artists site, and a few other useful tidbits of info. There are also add-ons for finding duplicates (iTunes duplicate finder is terrible,) and a plug-in for identifying dead tracks. However, I noticed on a couple occasions, that I had seen duplicate entries in my library, but the duplicate add-on had not found them. I had to locate and delete them manually. Also, if you do end up having multiple dead tracks, and you try to play one, you will receive an error message, then Songbird will try to play the next track, which if there are many dead tracks, will leave you stuck not being able to do anything until Songbird has tried and failed to play every track on the list. Also very frustrating. I've had to force quit the app several times since I started using it this morning. I have also been unable to locate an option to have Songbird automatically arrange files in the music folder by artist and album, like iTunes does, or automatically move files to the music folder when they are added into Songbird--another thing iTunes does.

So.......iTunes killer app? Not yet, but the potential is there. Maybe after a few more releases. Guess I'm stuck with iTunes for now, since Songbird is still not reliable enough for me to trust it managing my 12,000+ song music library. Definitely a program to keep your eye on though.....