bart's blog: Switching from iTunes to the new Songbird
spaetzel
· 1 year ago
I keep on trying Songbird and every time I find that it actually is slower than iTunes. I really would like Songbird to work well for me, but it seems to like to freeze up for no particular reason, so I always end up going back to iTunes.
Bartek
· 1 year ago
Are you on Windows or something else? iTunes on Windows for me is very slow and glitchy, and Songbird is a bit glitchy and slow, but nothing compared to iTunes. A player I lived by for a long time was foobar2000 but maintaining the scripts for it got too much of a hassle and I just ended up going the iTunes route
spaetzel
· 1 year ago
I'm on Vista right now. iTunes is slow for me too but it isn't as bad as Songbird. The main reason I stick with iTunes is that it is the best podcatcher, no other app downloads podcasts quite right.
Bartek
· 1 year ago
Ya .. the podcast support so far is weak which is why I can't fully switch yet. Like you (yes I've seen your CastRoller.com project ;) ) I too am an avid fan of podcasts and needs them to function
Dan Labute
· 1 year ago
Does it sync with iPods? If so, how well does it work? Album art? Podcast syncing?
I'll be trying it out, but just wanted to hear your opinions on those aspects of it too (if they're implemented).
Bartek
· 1 year ago
Dan, it has iPod syncing abilities but to be honest I can't recommend it yet over iTunes
Album art and all those other fancies are things you can get with addons, but album art comes pre-built
As for podcast syncing, as my article mentioned it was kind of flaky still so meh on that.
Rob Jones
· 1 year ago
I am currently trying Belenix an Opensolaris distribution.Having tried Songbird on MS I thought I would give it a go with unix.After downloading the Unix version I am as a newbie quite challenged at how to install it? As I have a windows background I naturally though I would open the binary like a zipe file and hay presto! This was not to be as I scattered files everywhere. One thing I would love to see it how to? on utube stile clips..is this just too much???..HELP!!!
Bartek
· 1 year ago
The Linux version provided by Songbird is in simple zipped format. You simply need to build it from source, depending how it's setup (I haven't installed it on Linux but it shouldnt be too hard) .. Just read up on building linux programs from source or check out the Songbird help forums
Red Canary
· 1 year ago
God I hate iTunes as well, I've been watching songbird for at least 2 (maybe even 3) years...talk about glacial development timeline. Are they ever going to get to 1.0?
Thing about songbird is that it's still brutally buggy at least for OS X. Not great with large libraries either. It crashes within 30 minutes and the iPod support is not good.
Glad to know that other people hate how bloated and restrictive iTunes is. : )
Jeff
· 1 year ago
I fooled with songbird for a bit and I like the direction it's headed but I need podcasts to work so it's not there yet. Hopefully they'll get it sorted by the time 1.0 ships in Nov. 2008. Can't wait!
By the way, I don't really get why Songbird needs an internal browser. Talk about bloat. Why can't it just integrate with the system default browser?
I'm running Win Vista and my favorite media player right now is Media Monkey. Strictly for windows but it's fast, stable, can handle huge libraries and podcasts. But I'm biased against iTunes: I am one of the 7 or 8 people in the world who bought a non-Apple mp3 player (Creative Zen for me)
Joe Bray
· 1 year ago
Songkick now has support for the Commonwealth of Nations!
pvh
· 1 year ago
Jeff,
better late than never, I suppose. You said you don't get why "Songbird includes its own browser." I keep hearing that, so I figure I'll step up and comment.
Technically, Songbird doesn't include a browser. Songbird is built out of Mozillean goodness, which means, in a certain sense, the browser is an ingredient. If Songbird were a cake, Mozilla would be the flour, not the icing. This has advantages and disadvantages. The big disadvantage is often noted in reviews -- memory bloat. We're always working against that, and although things are getting better, but it's just a fact of life for us. We're not trying to be Winamp, or even iTunes (though we definitely look and feel quite familiar to iTunes users with our default feather.)
But I digress. The big advantage is in how easy it is to hack on Songbird and create addons. For example, when you look at your default playlist view you're actually looking at a XUL document (playlist.xul, I believe) which contains a <sb:playlist/> element. With the Developer Tools installed, you can even view the source of that document. XUL looks and feels like an HTML document, and can even include HTML elements.
Because of that, it's super easy to hack in new addons which do things like my Metrics Add-On that takes an open source JS library and graphs up statistics of your collection. Or to make stupid toys like my "bubbles"extension, or useful sidebars like the media details view, or MashTape.
In fact, most of our addon developers write everything in Javascript and XUL and never have to compile a thing, which is *so* *much* *easier* than doing things in C++ that it's completely unbelievable. Particularly for distributing cross-platform addon development, which is just utter torture for compiled languages. Then, on top of all that we have all the awesome Firefox addons support built in, so that when you make an addon, it can be created, published, downloaded and installed, all within the application. Compare that to iTunes, which goes out of its way to lock developers out, or even with Winamp, where making an extension required learning a lot of C and setting up a difficult build environment. For most Songbird development, all you need is a good text editor. That's it.
SO. Is Songbird a good web browser? Hell no. It's not trying to compete with Firefox, or Google Chrome. Why would you surf the web in your media player? I know I don't. Sure, you can open up tabs with web content, but that's mainly because it's more convenient to open up things like lyrics search, wikipedia content, or concert information within the app. Try using Songbird to read music blogs, for example, and see how it creates playlists out of the content automatically, or maybe get music from the web with our seeqpod extension.
Sure, you could do all that stuff *without* being built on top of Mozilla, but it'd be a whole lot more work, and a whole lot less fun.
Anyway, I've written a bit of a book here, so I'll leave it at that. Hope everyone enjoys all the performance and memory use work we've done for 1.0, and if you haven't heard yet, 1.0rc1 is out.
PS: Woo hoo for Songkick data in Canada!
Bartek
· 1 year ago
pvh:
Wow, thanks for that hearty explanation .. I too was kind of curious about the browser in Songbird but that makes a lot of sense :)
Thanks for mentioning the 1.0 RC, I've been out of the loop for a bit!
P.S - Yes, yay for Songkick Canadian listings, just saw the news today, glad I can use that with Songbird now
All Comments
Songbird. The main reason I stick with iTunes is that it is the best
podcatcher, no other app downloads podcasts quite right.
I'll be trying it out, but just wanted to hear your opinions on those aspects of it too (if they're implemented).
Album art and all those other fancies are things you can get with addons, but album art comes pre-built
As for podcast syncing, as my article mentioned it was kind of flaky still so meh on that.
simply need to build it from source, depending how it's setup (I haven't
installed it on Linux but it shouldnt be too hard) .. Just read up on
building linux programs from source or check out the Songbird help forums
Thing about songbird is that it's still brutally buggy at least for OS X. Not great with large libraries either. It crashes within 30 minutes and the iPod support is not good.
Glad to know that other people hate how bloated and restrictive iTunes is. : )
By the way, I don't really get why Songbird needs an internal browser. Talk about bloat. Why can't it just integrate with the system default browser?
I'm running Win Vista and my favorite media player right now is Media Monkey. Strictly for windows but it's fast, stable, can handle huge libraries and podcasts. But I'm biased against iTunes: I am one of the 7 or 8 people in the world who bought a non-Apple mp3 player (Creative Zen for me)
better late than never, I suppose. You said you don't get why "Songbird includes its own browser." I keep hearing that, so I figure I'll step up and comment.
Technically, Songbird doesn't include a browser. Songbird is built out of Mozillean goodness, which means, in a certain sense, the browser is an ingredient. If Songbird were a cake, Mozilla would be the flour, not the icing. This has advantages and disadvantages. The big disadvantage is often noted in reviews -- memory bloat. We're always working against that, and although things are getting better, but it's just a fact of life for us. We're not trying to be Winamp, or even iTunes (though we definitely look and feel quite familiar to iTunes users with our default feather.)
But I digress. The big advantage is in how easy it is to hack on Songbird and create addons. For example, when you look at your default playlist view you're actually looking at a XUL document (playlist.xul, I believe) which contains a <sb:playlist/> element. With the Developer Tools installed, you can even view the source of that document. XUL looks and feels like an HTML document, and can even include HTML elements.
Because of that, it's super easy to hack in new addons which do things like my Metrics Add-On that takes an open source JS library and graphs up statistics of your collection. Or to make stupid toys like my "bubbles"extension, or useful sidebars like the media details view, or MashTape.
In fact, most of our addon developers write everything in Javascript and XUL and never have to compile a thing, which is *so* *much* *easier* than doing things in C++ that it's completely unbelievable. Particularly for distributing cross-platform addon development, which is just utter torture for compiled languages. Then, on top of all that we have all the awesome Firefox addons support built in, so that when you make an addon, it can be created, published, downloaded and installed, all within the application. Compare that to iTunes, which goes out of its way to lock developers out, or even with Winamp, where making an extension required learning a lot of C and setting up a difficult build environment. For most Songbird development, all you need is a good text editor. That's it.
SO. Is Songbird a good web browser? Hell no. It's not trying to compete with Firefox, or Google Chrome. Why would you surf the web in your media player? I know I don't. Sure, you can open up tabs with web content, but that's mainly because it's more convenient to open up things like lyrics search, wikipedia content, or concert information within the app. Try using Songbird to read music blogs, for example, and see how it creates playlists out of the content automatically, or maybe get music from the web with our seeqpod extension.
Sure, you could do all that stuff *without* being built on top of Mozilla, but it'd be a whole lot more work, and a whole lot less fun.
Anyway, I've written a bit of a book here, so I'll leave it at that. Hope everyone enjoys all the performance and memory use work we've done for 1.0, and if you haven't heard yet, 1.0rc1 is out.
PS: Woo hoo for Songkick data in Canada!
Wow, thanks for that hearty explanation .. I too was kind of curious about
the browser in Songbird but that makes a lot of sense :)
Thanks for mentioning the 1.0 RC, I've been out of the loop for a bit!
P.S - Yes, yay for Songkick Canadian listings, just saw the news today, glad
I can use that with Songbird now
http://blog.songbirdnest.com/