Songbird 0.4 developer release Screenshot

Well , while surfing net i came  across a new cross platform media player “Songbird” right now in 0.4 developer release , claiming “Powered by Mozilla” , that got me intrigued .Well , your’s truly , started downloading “songbird” (18.8 mb) , it was quite easy to install because you don’t have to ; just unzipping it works perfectly fine. :-D now that’s efficiency :) .

Songbird uses XULRunner , a gui toolkit used by firefox and gstreamer for sound on linux .. in case you are wondering what gstreamer is..its a sound producing engine( that comes with mp3 codec from fluxendo in open suse 10.3 ) ,,so songbird will work out of box on open suse 10.3 :)  (for more info on other softwares using XULRunner go to Linux World  )

On windows it comes with a installation and there it most probably uses vlc for sound, you wouldn’t have to install VLC seprately  .

I tested songbird on basis of gui efficiency ,web integration, stability, add ons(plug in /extension) capability ,developer friendliness,playlist management(and not sound quality as it depend on gstreamer),i am yet to test devide support (like ipod ,that woule appended to this article once i get mroe info on it..).

now on gui part i would rather give it 6 out of 10 right now as the default skin is good but still sometimes it proves too dark , its theme able like Firefox ,and themes are coming up as its still developing . The gui is bit slow in comparison to native qt4 /gtk+ players like amarok ,rythmbox etc. i think this is inherent slowness of gecko / XULRunner engine and would change with newer versions but i couldn’t find a standard way to make songbird go to my system tray in Linux , now that’s a must every music player big or small can go to system tray , i think that should be corrected .

Slow refresh problem is evident when i changed feather (skin)

it has a mini version too

Look what i got..Songbird Looks same as Itunes (one of its feathers named birdie )

Now comes the good part “web integration”..(8/10)well that’s where songbird is far better than its competitors even at development stage .it has a inbuilt Firefox type browser which can identify music itself and give you direct download option, iserached enya in it and got back 10 result with direct download buttons at lower half . podcast are treated as subscriptions and file>new subscription is the option to get new podcast , though last fm support is still not available in 0.3 version , but for 0.4 there isplugin whichc i didn’t try.

as seen in songbird group of LAST FM “We’ve got an in-development (read: not ready for primetime) Audioscrobbler add-on for the Songbird 0.4pre nightly’s (should work in 0.3.x as well, but hasn’t been tested).” and http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/106 for better detail on audioscrobble extension.

songbird is quite stable(7/10) in comparison to its predecessors but still it hanged my computer while searching for 10,000+ songs on my computer for making music library(and incidentally my Firefox crashed after that , do we see some kind of pattern here :D ).

addon support (9/10)is quite good..and just like firefox extensions you could update ,automatically download addons

play list management (7/10), its interface is much like itunes , so it offers all goodness of itunes in that respect with openness of Firefox with addons like album art flow and others it also provides library mamangement of quality that can give amarok serious competition.

WEB developer (8/10) heaven ,yup that’s should what songbird should be called ,it has support for Scripting(javascript) , CSS ,Java and what not ..just try it out ,i think it supports everything that firefox supports ..

profile management

songbird is still developing but it really promises to be “firefox of music players”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under linux, review, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.