Rock On With Songbird
November 6th, 2008
Songbird.
Cult of Mac and Webmonkey are wondering if iTunes suck. They're stating that Songbird is worth checking out. And so I did.
I waited for 40 megs of disk image to download and dragged the 160 MB application to my applications folder. 160 megs? It's not that much nowadays, but iTunes takes up "only" 130 megabytes.
To make you comfortable switching from iTunes, Songbird asks if you want to migrate the iTunes library. My 3 gig library imported in few minutes. It even maintained my ratings and play counts, which is nice.
Songbird has quite the same user interface that iTunes has. There's a sidebar with playlists and you can browse library by genre, artist and album. There's actually nothing new to iTunes, except for the back and forward buttons.
Integrated browser
Songbird contains an integrated web browser and I'm wondering why is that. Isn't my Firefox or Safari any good for browsing? It doesn't offer an option to use my favorite browser and it is quite big let down for me. In my opinion the browser could be removed from the package and keep things simple as possible.
Songbird is offering something iTunes user's only dream of: add-ons. Similar to Firefox, you can browse Songbird's site to get user generated add-ons for playback and library management, appearance etc. There's is a quite nice list of add-ons but I didn't find an add-on for controlling the playback from OS X's menu bar, just like with You Control: Tunes available for iTunes.
Songbird takes up approximately 70 megs of system memory while iTunes takes up only 40 megs - so I have to wonder why they claim that iTunes takes up too much system resources.
The best part is that Songbird is completely open source, which iTunes certainly isn't. This means that someday it might be far better than iTunes will ever be. They got it almost right, but I think I'll wait for a while and see how Songbird is developing and have it another go later on. Now I'm staying with my iTunes.