Songbird is a new open-source music player that has this week landed at 1.0. Songbird is described as a “web player”– a music player for this modern, connected era. It blends the web-rendering core of Firefox (Gecko), with the media capabilities of GStreamer– a cross-platform, open-source media playback engine.
With an integrated (and capable) browser, Songbird allows you to wander off to find new sources of music all within the app itself. It’s in this area that Songbird can claim many features not readily available in other players:
- Use a web page or an RSS feed as a playlist, automatically finding audio files within
- Web search using Firefox’s MyCroft search bar / management, allowing you to add new search providers when visting a site that includes a MyCroft or OpenSearch provider.
- Last.fm integration
- “mashTape” pane that finds artist info and related Flickr photos / YouTube videos & Google News
- Add-ins support using the same XUL backbone as Firefox. (Yes, AdBlock / NoScript are available)
This article will cover me reviewing the Songbird experience, coming from an iTunes user with an already chunky iTunes library of some 6’000 items.
- Test Machine
-
- 15“ MacBook Pro (Early 2007)
- 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2 GB RAM
- Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”
- Getting Songbird
-
Songbird is readily available from getsongbird.com in these flavours:
- Windows XP-SP2 / Vista (11.7 MB)
- Linux i686 (28.7 MB)
- Linux x64 (30 MB)
- Mac OS X Leopard, Intel Only (28.7 MB)
Community contributed builds have also been produced for Solaris and Mac PPC
The Mac download expands into a 117 MB app file (iTunes is 129 MB)
First Run
I’m reviewing this app from the standpoint of a regular user already using iTunes, who has decided to download and try out Songbird, having heard good word about it – much the same story as users trying out and switching to Firefox.
Whilst this might present a somewhat unfair position of comparing Songbird to iTunes in someway, I feel that doing a “clean-room†evaluation of Songbird would not prove much in the real world, as well as it would deny testing one important feature of Songbird: it’s iTunes importing capabilities.
Migrating from one app to another is always a very fearful experience. You don’t know if the new app is going to make a total mess of your old data and leave you with a clean-up operation that will take weeks. Before running Songbird for the first time, I made sure my Time Machine backup was up to date meaning that I could do a hassle-free roll back should things go wrong. Throughout this review I’ll be keeping my eye on how well Songbird co-exists with iTunes.
Upon starting the app and after a licence agreement and an introduction page, you are presented with the import options:
Thankfully Songbird provides the ability to import an iTunes library, and can handle external changes made by iTunes.
The next page provides some default add-ins to expand Songbird functionality. Personally, I hate any advertising in the software I use, especially stuff that gives information out to websites in order to sell me stuff. However, I let these add-ins be as I would like to experience the default Songbird design.
If anything the benefits of easy plug-in functionality via the add-ins means that one can be mix-‘n’-match according to taste, rather than being lumped with ‘bloat’ with no option to remove it (A problem that greatly plagues software with ever increasing version numbers).
Hmm, checked by default. Personally, I’d close and remove the app right now. I find that kind of behaviour massively disrespectful. Real were pulling this stunt years ago and I still don’t trust any software that asks for an email address, optional or not. Regardless, the average user would in most cases just click “Finish”.
Songbird took approximately 5 minutes to import my library of nearly 6’000 items.
Both iTunes and Songbird start from cold in about the same time (5 seconds).
The playlist folders I had in iTunes were not imported, instead they were converted into playlists themselves. This is kind of a nuisance, as I had been relying on the functionality of iTunes automatically combining playlists live by viewing the parent folder.
The Main Window
There’s nothing special to say about Songbird’s look other than it’s mostly like iTunes, but with the main toolbar at the bottom. This can be switched to the top, via “View > Player Controls > On Top”. The other bar at the top is the tab bar, allowing you to browse and search websites.
The various display panes (mashTape / Album Art) can easily be hidden by the docking buttons below them. Songbird is extra flexible though, letting you get add-on side panes such as a folder view or lyrics browser, as well as swapping around which side-pane module is shown in each of the panes. This flexibility and easy manner to get new modules for the panes should allow for a lot of innovation to happen outside of the main Songbird development.
The genre browser has a different kind of button to hide it which is quite cryptic and not immediately obvious. It’s left of the search bar, but you can always choose the “View > Media Views > List View” menu.
“mashTape”
mashTape can help solve a lot of your curiosity about various songs and artists, automatically pulling in (hopefully related) info from the web.
The “Photos” tab finds pictures from Flickr. It seems like something that would entertain YouTube users, rather than a feature I would actually want to make use of.
Playback Experience
Any audio player lives and dies based on its ability to play audio. Songbird’s wide support for audio files is going to please some people. Between users hurt by Apple removing FLAC from iTunes, and supporters of open formats like OGG – Songbird caters, but Songbird even plays nicely in a proprietary world; it being able to play DRM protected tracks via hooks into QuickTime and Windows Media Player, as appropriate.
In the mini player view though, I did get odd error messages saying that the song could not be played because it was encrypted, yet it was already playing fine. Clearly just a minor bug.
There is no cross-fade support yet, and I encountered a number of jittery moments where songs cut off a second or two early, or the player just stopped entirely after a song and hung there on the next song waiting for me to hit the top of the box to kick it back into playing.
I miss not having iTunes simple party shuffle mode, and when I do shuffle the play order in a playlist, the focus doesn’t follow the current song as I skip
Overall though, if your library is diverse and you’re more particular about the formats you store your music in, Songbird will work well for you. Songbird plays generally well with your iTunes purchases so there’s no real reason to not try Songbird out for yourselves.
Bugs
Without effort I found a large number of bugs, here’s some of the notable and easily reproduced ones
- Preferences sometimes broken
- Trying to open the app‘s preferences did not work – it was the first thing I tried when using the app for the first time. Then the app wouldn’t close and had to be force-quitted. If I do get the preferences open, it often doesn’t show some of the sections when I click on them.
- Main window disappears when focus lost
- For a long period, the Songbird window simply hid itself everytime I changed focus to another app
- Web browser functions breaking library view
- The “View > Page Style > No Style” menu, despite being for web pages, works in the library view and disables some of the CSS styling of the app
- Default shortcuts for next / previous song…
- …are Ctrl+Arrows, which are assigned to switching spaces in OS X. iTunes uses just plain left and right arrows when the list is in focus
- Keyboard Shortcuts help bug
- If using the mini-player, clicking the “Help > Keyboard Shortcuts” menu brings up an open-with dialog
- Pressing the close button closes the whole app, entirely
- In OS X, the red bead closes the current window but doesn’t usually quit the entire app too, so that the app remains in memory and can be re-launched quickly, or can continue doing something in the background – like, I don’t know – playing music, perhaps. Cmd+Q, or the menu item is the only thing that should quit the app entirely.
- Cmd+W closes tab, won’t close window
- Cmd+W closes each browser tab, but then doesn’t close the main window when only the library view is left. I’m used to pressing Cmd+W to dismiss iTunes (or any main Mac app), but leave it running
“Missing” Features
A feature is, of course, not missing if it was never meant to be there in the first place. However, as this is not a clean-room review of Songbird – whereby I review something by living in a closed box, unaware that it’s no longer the year 2000 and other products have existed for a long time – I take the viewpoint that what Songbird doesn’t have in parity with iTunes is therefore missing as far as a regular consumer is concerned (should they make use of that feature).
That is simply the harsh reality that open source developers must face, and that Songbird does want to face (given it’s current iTunes importing ability), but falls short of in the following ways
No video support
None. This was not a goal of 1.0 and is something to be visited in later versions of Songbird, however what I found shoddy about this fact was that Songbird does nothing to acknowledge that it does not play video.
It could exclude videos from showing up in the library. It could warn me with a message when trying to play a video – instead you just get the sound. It could do something to better warn you that video is not currently an option – rather than hide this fact on the very bottom of their features page.
No True Podcast Support
You can emulate podcasting by subscribing to the podcast’s website or RSS feed – however this is just a static pull of listed audio files. No video support. No auto-pruning. No tidy categorisation / management.
No CD Playing, Ripping, Burning
No, really.
Conclusions
I appreciate it’s a new app and has taken a long time to create, but what am I expected to do? Not use CDs until they get around to it? It seems like Songbird 1.0 relies entirely on a symbiotic relationship with iTunes.
To call this product 1.0 is like throwing in the towel, accepting that it’s just not possible to beat iTunes, or even Windows Media Player, or even support basic features – like playing a CD, that’s been possible for around 16 years.
Songbird is a project that, given its limited resources, has to look toward the future first and pickup the past on the way. The time and effort spent in web-integration and add-in support is what makes Songbird a notable player. For if Songbird were without these two aspects of its design there would be absolutely no reason to live with what it’s missing in lieu of what it has.
I believe that Songbird will succeed better in the Linux environment, which – dare I say it – has a more Unix-like software ecosystem that provides many smaller apps to achieve the tasks of one large homogeneous one. Linux distros all have their preferred CD-ripper / tagger / burner and video-player. In Mac OS X and Windows, maybe not so much the case.
Songbird is not an app I will be using anytime soon. It is an app however that covers its nakedness with its innovation. There may be hope, then, that its emperor’s clothes approach to features will be seen as beautiful in the long run.
- Pros
-
- Portability across Windows / Mac / Linux and anywhere else someone manages to compile it
- Decent mini player
- Cons
-
- No direct podcast support, can be “emulated” through subscribing to a website or RSS feed XML
- No CD support
- Vague privacy
- Long road ahead to feature parity with iTunes
- Sins
-
- I encountered many bugs, big and small, just in my normal usage
- No video support, no UX to acknowledge that
- Second class citizen on OS X. Lacking theme polish. Poor non-standard behaviour
I’ve been using Songbird on and off throughout most of it’s dev cycle and I have to say, they’ve done a really nice job. With the .7 series, it became my default media player on Windows.
For me, there’s really one thing a media player needs to do before I even consider the other things it can do: navigate my existing music collection without choking or lagging. I have an exceptionally large music collection and it drives me nuts when the interface lags when I try to scroll through the artists or songs or whatever. With the 1.0 RCs and final, they seem to have done a pretty good job keeping the interface responsive as it scrolls through some rather long lists. After that, all the other fancy addons and services they link to are just gravy.
So, congrats to the Songbird devs for a job well done and congrats to the users who now have a pretty kick ass and cross platform media manager.
Edited 2008-12-04 18:53 UTC
I have tested Songbird on windows, however to me, it just seems like a project to bring iTunes to Linux, although there is nothing wrong with that.
The UI is well crafted and will hopefully inspire other projects to think more about design.
Perhaps, cuz it’s going to be pretty useless as an iTunes replacement on Windows/OSX until/unless it can support iPods and iPhones, along with the iTunes Music Store (or a suitable replacement).
Don’t get me wrong… I hate iTunes with a passion, but it seems to work rather well for the average Joe with an iPod.
Support via Addons. Don’t forget SongBird is the Firefox of Media Player.
Ahhh, that should probably add that as a footnote or something
Check out Banshee. It is iTunes-like but better in my opinion.
Check out MPD with Sonata, it’s actually usable.
Are you inferring that Banshee isn’t usable? For me it is the best media player available bar none. Sonata kind of looks like a rip off of Muine which Banshee can now emulate with Muinshee.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Banshee has an ill thought out interface that attempts to do far too much in a single, untabbed window, and too much overall (video? statistics? blech!) Amarok, iTunes, Rhythmbox… I’ve never understood how anyone can stand these huge windows dedicated to such a simple task as playing music.
Sonata shares a passing resemblance with Muine, but the functionality is far different because Muine forces you to open new windows for a lot of basic tasks which Sonata does not.
I guess it’s just taste then. I think tabs in a music player is unecessary. Banshee is also completely customizable so you only need to show the statistics that you want to show and you can disable the browser too. With the search feature of Banshee you don’t really need the browser. Without the browser banshee is perfectly usable in a small window. There is a mini-mode too if you want a really tiny window. It’s not really an issue for me though because I use virtual desktops.
I too saw some of the same bugs on the Mac, and hope these get fixed in the next release. Also, video would be really nice. In an alternate utopian universe, I envision the Songbird and Miro projects uniting and forming the ultimate browser/player for all kinds of free internet media.
Quite honestly, I could care less about CD-ripping capability. However, in order for this to be unqualifiably recommendable to my friends (as Firefox is), it should have this.
Songbird definitely has a larger potential than any other media player I have ever seen, because it’s got an infinitely extensible UI. With its convenient and ever-expanding tie-ins to web services, it’s especially well-positioned for the user-created-content revolution. I sincerely believe that one day, as Firefox has done to IE, Songbird could eke out a significant niche as a popular #2 after iTunes.
“The Mac download expands into a 117 MB”
I pretty much lost interest after that. For me, a music player should be something to play music in the background and use minimal resources doing so. I don’t need some behemoth running in the background all the time, integrating every single online source of information into the app itself on the off-chance that I might want to look that stuff up.
By all means, allow me to get to the wikipedia/lyrics/pictures page for an artist/song, but why people think embedding this info into a music player is a good idea is beyond me. Those things exist on the web, and the correct tool for viewing them is a web browser. Instead of embedding a browser engine in your app, launch the browser with the correct link so I can view it properly and maintain the separation of responsibilities between apps.
You need to understand how Mac apps work. Everything is in the one file. It’s not like Windows where one app has parts in Program Files, DLLs in System 32, and then stuff in the Registry, and in other cases yet more in Common Files…
If you had continued reading – you would have noticed that the very next line says that iTunes is 129 MB.
Remember that this size includes all the translations — something you don’t get with many Windows apps, if at all — as well as all of the open source libraries (like GStreamer) that have to be bundled because Songbird is not a native OS X app, using the native APIs.
I think you’re doing yourself a disfavour by taking the file size into account, especially given that either a) you don’t use a Mac AND/OR b) you never compared the file size to any of the other apps on the Mac.
Everything is not in one file! It may look like a file to you but it is a directory, a special one, but a directory none the less.
Semantics. It’s still all within one location. Saying “it’s a directory” doesn’t invalidate my point one iota. (How many iotas are there in a point?)
And which, with the exception of a maximum of one translation, are completely worthless and a waste of time and space.
Linux users used to have to sit through endless rounds watching:
blah_blah_enGB
blah_blah_enUS
blah_blah_sp
blah blah_de
blah_blah_tw
blah_blah_se
…
scroll by endlessly on installations and updates. Thank the deities that be that Linux distros finally got a clue.
Mac apps really do this?
Did you know that people who don’t speak English outnumber people who do?
Of course I am well aware of that. (Do you not remember my calls for more people to learn Esperanto a few months ago?) And so are Linux distros. You select a language, or languages during installation, and that is all that you get. Why should someone who speaks Russian be loaded up with simplified Chinese translations and font packages?
P.S. Contratulations. But don’t let your new editorship go to your head. 😉
Edited 2008-12-04 22:01 UTC
I’ll always be the troll I was
I can assure you that nothing will change about how opinionated I am! I hope that people will be aware by now that I show my love through brutal honesty, sarcasm and sharp wit 
This has been the freakiest week in the history of evar for me. I’ve had all sorts of when-hell-freezes-over moments, but this one tops them.
Dude, I totally agree with sbergman27.
I just want to select “English (UK)” during installation, and be done with it (computing in my native language is silly and awkward). On my Mac, lots of space is wasted on supporting languages I don’t use, and the only way to reclaim this space is through 3rd party tools that often break some applications or even the operating system as a whole.
I hope Apple realises this one of these days. Heck, I don’t think the MAc even HAS English (UK). It just has the US variant.
Edited 2008-12-04 22:11 UTC
Isn’t this something being somehow addressed in Snow Leopard? All the apps have significantly reduced file sizes. Something about centralising the help documentation and translations — I can’t remember for sure.
Certainly how it is now is crude and clunky, but we musn’t be obtuse just because most only speak only one language and have only one culture.
(I only speak two languages: English, and Bad English)
It’s not about how many languages one speaks (I do a few), but about control. I don’t need anything else than UI in English, and spelling control in UK and NL – that’s it. The rest is just wasted space. And it can amount to hundreds of megabytes on a Mac.
A simple control panel applet where you can remove unused languages would suffice. Doesn’t even need to be at install time.
That is not to say others do it any better. Try getting spelling control installed on Windows or Office – other than your default one. Is it even possible?
Yeah.. it’s not that hard. Office comes with an applet to add additional language spelling and grammar support and Windows has a dialog which you can use to add keyboard, handwriting, and speech input layouts.
Is it really that unusual for us to agree? I find that I sometimes agree with you and sometimes disagree with you. Perhaps I’m more likely to post about it when I disagree.
At any rate, in this case I can’t help but feel that we are only agreeing on an item in the category “duh”. You know, in there with “the flu sucks” and “Britney Spears is annoying”. 😉
aptitude install localepurge
pretty simple really.
RawMustard posted…
Great! Now can I do the same thing as that (remove all the unnecessary language files) in OSX?
{crickets chirp}
Oh and without having to pay a premium to rescue all this wasted hard disk space?
{silence}
Yeah I thought so…although I’ll be happy to be proven wrong if anyone knows of a utility that does this for free or built in to the Operating system itself.
–bornagainpenguin (preparing the recipe for crow pie but not expecting to need it)
http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/
chrisoverzero indicated…
Can’t talk right now, busy eating crow…
–bornagainpenguin
PS: Thanks for proving me wrong; this is one instance I was hoping I was incorrect!
All of that aside, his complaint made no sense.
File size has nothing to do with resource usage (other than storage memory).
For example, any recoding app will use lots of resources but doesn’t necessarily take up much space on the hard drive,
“The Mac download expands into a 117 MB”
Mac applications generally carry all the static libraries in one single file. There is a different philosophy of setup in Mac: There’s no setup of anything. Just drag and run. I don’t think it’s the best philosophy when it comes down for shared libraries and take advantage of what’s already in memory. But Mac does have a resource fork (meaning that it should be much more than 117 totally static).
It’s even worse for security update management.
That’s not true. Mac apps generally have dynamic libraries/frameworks, which can be embedded in the application bundle or located in a shared location such as ~/Library/Frameworks or /Library/Frameworks.
Drag-install apps usually use the embedded method, but apps that use installers are free to locate frameworks in either of the shared locations.
When-oh-when will finally a media player (other than our own that is, check out http://mpx.backtrace.info </shameless plug>) support MusicBrainz? Having a unique ID per album, artist and track, and artist sort names is just so much better.
mashTape is nice but I’ve been working on a similar plugin for our player, based on WebKit, for about a year now too, without knowing that mashTape existed. Kudos for that, it was time that someone (else) did this.
Buut.. MusicBrainz… braiiiiiiiiiiinzzzz.. please! I want my VA (and other multi-artist) albums have individual artists, but be sorted under Various Artists, not scattered all across the library navigation!
I tested songbird back in the 0.7x series. What appealed to me wasn’t so much that it did what other open source media players did, but that it did so *elegantly*. The interface is just so much more polished IMO than condenders like Amarok and even Banshee. As well, it’s Firefox-like system of add-ons is simply amazing, and sets it apart from the rest. There were a few flaws – like not being able to change the chrome’s default font size – which I imagine will be addressed in time.
More to the point, the Songbird team seems actively interested in getting user feedback. One time I launched Songbird, and it asked me if I wanted to participate in a short survey. I happily did, and even filled out the comments section at the end with a few of my suggestions. The fact they’ve built user feedback right into the application they’re trying to improve shows great insight into how community-driven software projects should be run. Bravo.
My one point of concern is their backend: SQLite. Amarok has moved away from SQLite, in favor of Mysql(e). Like MechaShiva I also have a large digital music collection. I don’t see the appeal in moving to an inferior indexing database. If perhaps, like Amarok 1.x, Songbird would at least give the *option* of using an external Mysql database, I could be persuaded to try it once more.
I am also a bit suspect on the stability of XUL-based applications, but maybe that’s something I just need to get over.
I never really got iTunes at all or any really big media player. I used WinAMP on Windows for a long time. When they came out with WinAMP 3 I stopped, then when they came out with WinAMP 5 (2+3), I used it with the WinAMP 2 skin and turned all that media library stuff off.
On Linux I used to use XMMS, then once distro’s started calling it insecure and stopped supporting it I switched over to Audacious. I dunno, something about a minimal player with play, pause, stop, next, previous, and a simple playlist editor with load and save support is all I could ever want.
Audacious is all I need with my keyboard / mouse and XBMC is all I need with my xbox controller at my TV. Same stuff, simple browser, start, stop, play, next, previous, and a loadable, savable, easy to use playlist editor.
I think it’s largely a matter of taste / preference. FWIW, I’m in the same boat as you are – I’d much rather use small, best-of-breed applications that focus on a specific task. Most of my music is stored on a BeOS machine, using Tracker / BFS attributes for indexing/cataloguing, SoundPlay for playback, ArmyKnife for tagging, and the RipEnc script for ripping and encoding.
Although I can certainly see why someone would prefer an end-to-end solution that handles all of those tasks.
Using the FS xattrs for managing [natively] music (and photos) is the dream I’ve always wanted in an OS. I would greatly be interested in a detailed write-up / break-down of that system you’ve got there. That sort of thing I find fascinating.
My setup is in a bit of shambles at the moment, thanks to a hard drive crash last year. But I’ve been thinking about rebuilding it (most of the files were mirrored on other drives, thankfully) and documenting the process as a how-to guide.
The biggest limitation is that the BeOS filemanager (Tracker) has no way to natively read ID3 tags from files (as Win Explorer and, I believe, Finder do) – so separate apps need to be used to convert the tags to filesystem attributes. Though SoundPlay will do it automatically when a file is first played, and there are apps that can batch-convert the tags from multiple files.
Without going on and on, I find the biggest advantage is that it’s extremely simple to customize the way files are displayed / listed. I normally use really verbose filenames (Track Num – Artist – Album – Title.mp3), but then set the filemanager to show only the track number & song title – and sort by track number. Attributes can also be set for the folders containing each individual album – so you can do stuff like sort the ablums for an individual artist by year, without having to put it in the folder name.
I’m intrigued by your novel approach. I used BeOS a bit in the late nineties. It’s attribute-extensible filesystem was certainly one of it’s great strengths. It was like having the power of a relational database built right in.
> Without going on and on, I find the biggest advantage is that it’s extremely simple to customize the way files are displayed / listed.
I can see how you felt BeOS was the right tool for the job.
IMO, any old program can play media files. The real holy grail is helping me find novel and interesting ways of grouping songs together. That way I can find what mood I’m in, and select the type of music to match, and then just sit back and listen while the program does the rest. Most programmers don’t seem to get that while ‘genre’, ‘artist’ and ‘album’ are good ways of grouping songs together, by themselves they don’t always make for very diverse, interesting, or pleasing playlists.
Thanks – although I can’t take much credit. IIRC, there was an article in BeTips back in the R4.5 days that described how to create BFS attributes corresponding to ID3 tags.
Absolutely. For a while, the BeTips site was powered by a set of scripts that used text files with BFS attributes as a database. When I started with SQL, it already seemed familiar after having used command line & formula queries in BeOS.
I know what you mean – I’ve never really found any way to do that other than creating playlists manually.
Though you mentioned it in the beginning of the review, you never tried out or reviewed any of Songbird’s abilities to navigate webpages with music embeded, and pull the music out for quick playback. It also allows you to download these songs and add them to your library. I suppose you ignored these cause you were comparing it to iTunes, but you’re “Missing Features” at the end makes it seem like Songbird is simply an iTunes clone that doesn’t do everything iTunes does. Would you say that those features are “Missing” from iTunes?
Those features, when used in conjunction with a site like Skreemr, are really sick and are really what sets Songbird apart. I think part of their mentality has been, why re-invent the wheel on something that every platform can already do easily with another app? Instead they focused on developing the stuff that is new and unique, but you completely ignored those things in your review!
Don’t get me wrong, I do agree with you that they should get CD Playback working, and maybe eventually include CDDB Querying and ripping ability. I’m just saying don’t throw Songbird out without giving those other features a try, they’re great, and thats why I’ve been following and using Songbird for a while now!
Thank you, I think this is a very valid criticism.
In trying to slim down the review I left out a screenshot of this very feature. Indeed it does blend websites and player together in a much more natural and easy way.
I avoided going into it in detail because I was disappointing that despite this feature, there was no podcasting built in.
If anything, I’m one of the worse people to review something like Songbird. I don’t use many web services until long after everybody else has discovered the privacy concerns. I don’t use Last.fm, I’ve never in my life heard of Skreemr until I used Songbird – (and personally would have avoided links to such a site based entirely on the terrible name).
I am much more conservative about what I let the web do for me, than I do for it.
That said, I wanted to do this review because everything I had read so far from other sites regarding the Songbird release kind of felt empty and too much like a lengthy announcement than any critique. Ars Technica, who I had hoped would give it a thorough addressing failed to grill the software beyond acknowledging its existence and reading the spec sheet. Any complaints they had were forgiven in the wake of being indifferent about the whole thing.
Open source should not be given a free-ride – journalism / critique wise – just because it doesn’t have the same funding or whatever. Software is software and it either serves its users or it does not. It is down to spirit. I would have even harsher criticisms if I were reviewing Windows Media Player 11 – Songbird got off *very* lightly from me
edit: wide -> wise
Edited 2008-12-04 21:58 UTC
“Light”.
I’m using it from my Linux box and did not even istall the Deb ( I used the base Tar.gz that is on the site).
Even uncompiled and just pasted in that barbaric way on my system it kicks the crap out of Amarok the hands behind the back.
I have to state that I never loved Amarok very much, I always found it unbearably heavy for what he did ( honestly, do you really need THAT infrastructure to play some Mp3s?), but Songbird is another planet.
I’m in love with the concept of this program, a couple of plugins later I had Magnatune and Shoutcast running and was happily tagging my music collection.
“Happily” is another important word, because this program is FUN.
Mediaplayer, browser, heck, if I wanted it to do it I could even become my IRC program ( chatzilla plugin already available).
Sure it is rough ( as in “interface needs some serious love”) and buggy ( at certain moments menus just disappears and you need to restart the app), but it is quick to recover and friendly as few programs can be.
Firefox made me rediscover the web, Songbird is bringing me back my music and I LOVE each second of it
This review seems a little biased towards expecting a full iTunes replacement on a 1.0 release, especially when you get to page 4 and read this:
“To call this product 1.0 is like throwing in the towel, accepting that it’s just not possible to beat iTunes, or even Windows Media Player, or even support basic features – like playing a CD, that’s been possible for around 16 years.”
Ugh, Songbird never set out to replace iTunes or anything else, it uses a very flexible technology base that gives it the freedom to develop into so much more, eventually surpassing current media players in various fields. Personally, as a jukebox app it seems like it’s come a long way, and the fact that it doesn’t play CDs is something I’m perfectly fine with, considering CDs don’t neatly fit into the whole paradigm of playing your personal locally-stored library of music. And these basic features are things that can easily be added on if someone really wanted to. I think the fact there isn’t an add-on for this functionality kind of supports the idea that not many people want it.
On page three, all the bugs he mentions very well may be easily reproducible, but only on OS X, they are Mac-specific. The reviewer couldn’t be bothered to load up Boot Camp or VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop to give the Windows version a spin to see if it suffered the same problems? Come on, some metrics put OS X market share even further behind Linux market share (Though I would say OS X is probably ahead slightly on desktops). I point this out because this is obviously someone who is deeply entrenched not only in Apple technology but in Apple ideology. Look, a jukebox app doesn’t have to support everything Apple under the sun to be a successful and useful jukebox app, it has to do what it advertises, and that’s play media. In this case, the reviewer either can’t read the front page for Songbird or the Songbird developers responded incredibly quickly to this article because it notes prominently that it is a music player. They aren’t hiding anything.
Let’s go along the cons here:
No direct podcast support, can be “emulated” through subscribing to a website or RSS feed XML – Granted, but wouldn’t this require built-in video playback support, not just streaming via the web interface?
No CD support – Addressed earlier in my post.
Vague privacy – Granted, they should probably develop a privacy policy to assuage fears.
Long road ahead to feature parity with iTunes – This is so conceited, by my measure it is already far surpassing iTunes in features, most importantly playback of every format I can think of. Everything else can be added via extensions, so ultimately this program has far more potential than iTunes could even dream of. This kind of arrogance is typical of people who use iTunes for a far more specific subset of needs (My iPod!) than the average user who just wants to play their collection.
Now the sins:
I encountered many bugs, big and small, just in my normal usage – Addressed earlier, these bugs are not reproducible without using your specific platform, and I hope you submitted some bug reports.
No video support, no UX to acknowledge that – The front page says “The Open Music Player”. When did music player translate to audio/video?!
Second class citizen on OS X. Lacking theme polish. Poor non-standard behaviour – Look, OS X gets less attention not because of any snubbing but because of a lack of resources. If you want it to be better on OS X, provide constructive feedback through the proper channels.
All in all I think this review could do with a little more depth and a little more thoughtfulness. It praises Songbird’s innovation while at the same time bemoaning its feature set because it lacks specific technological tie-ins that he has gotten so attached to. This is a jukebox application, it is not an iTunes killer, though in time I have no doubt addons will arise that will make iTunes less necessary for those techs that Songbird currently lacks. This review is so incredibly short-sighted to ignore that Firefox became arguably the greatest web browser period not because of it’s base package but because of the cornucopia of extensions to make it behave how you want it to behave, not how some developer decided it should.
Really, every single compliment given to Songbird seems to be completely backhanded, and it’s insulting to say its chances of success on Linux is much greater than on Windows or Mac OS X because quite frankly it has the greatest challenge on Linux, and that’s beating amaroK and the likes of mpd.
iTunes already exists, and most people are using it. I compared it to iTunes, even unfairly, because that’s exactly what it is up against when people download Songbird to use it.
There is no magical amnesia effect that means when you install Songbird, suddenly I no longer have any need at all for the features I was using in iTunes.
Being a 1.0 is not an excuse – when people are going to download Songbird and try it out, many having already used iTunes and Windows Media Player — and yes, many may find that Songbird is a very good player because they never used CDs anyway &c.
If you expect fairness, because you expect me to address Songbird from the perspective of a user who has never used any other media player before, then you should write a rebuttal article. Correct me.
As it stands, Songbird is an innovate project, that doesn’t do what I’m currently doing with other software.
As for OS X. It’s my primary platform. It takes care and attention to detail to make a decent Mac app, and that is a good sign of quality in any new app to see that attention given. I should have added that Firefox didn’t get the right sort of attention until 3.0.
If I can use a product for the first time, and spot 10-15 glaring bugs within a few hours use, there’s something wrong the development process, or simply not enough eyes viewing the product during beta. (Apparently none, given I could uncover bugs within seconds).
It doesn’t matter if I’m using Windows or OS X – if I’m finding bugs that quickly then I highly doubt that the product will be flawless and bug free on another platform.
As I’ve made clear – I’m not being kind to Songbird just because it’s new, or because it’s some darling of open source. It’s playing in the real world, and the real world means iTunes; like it or lump it.
It’s a good project, that will yield results in two to three years, but I’m not going to write a floral and superficial review like that I’ve seen elsewhere.
edit: PS. modded you up, all valid criticisms.
Edited 2008-12-05 10:51 UTC
Get a sense of perspective Kroc, you act like iTunes wasn’t woefully inadequate in its 1.0 days when compared to how it is now. Here’s a little bit of history for you: http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/14/itunes-from-0-0-to-7-0/
I blasted you for being unfair to Songbird by expecting it to be a drop-in replacement for iTunes at its first 1.0 release, when iTunes has taken what, almost 8 years to get to the point it’s at today. You make it seem like a 1.0 release is the only chance that an application has to flesh out what it really truly is, and you ignore that your little darling program was, in all honesty, a piece of junk when it first hit the scene, compared to what people had been using.
MacOSX and Linux users (Of which I am both a part of) are notoriously unforgiving of a program that is not completely spick-and-span, conforming entirely to whatever UI guidelines and setup they may have. We also tend to forget that development of a software project is ultimately community/user-driven through feedback to the people who have the ability to add/tweak things. “It takes care and attention to detail to make a decent Mac app, and that is a good sign of quality in any new app to see that attention given.” Please, it takes care and attention to detail to make a decent app on any platform, and you are being nothing but unreasonable in expecting perfection, as you say it flawless and bug-free. Guess what, very few programs are flawless and bug-free, and they tend to be incredibly small and for a very specific purpose. Your beloved iTunes is in no way flawless and bug-free, just a few months back it was causing Blue Screen errors on Vista: http://gizmodo.com/5047721/itunes-8-causing-huge-problems-bsod-for-…
Wow, I guess that must mean Apple is some sort of amateur outfit who couldn’t be bothered to test on every platform they release for as thoroughly as we would like them to test. Stop expecting the world and then some from this small group of open source developers with infinitely less resources than corporations like Apple and Microsoft. The point is that bugs happen, we provide feedback and they get squashed. It’s not like Songbird formatted your data partition or something monumental, it lost focus or had shortcomings on your niche system (Yes, OSX is a NICHE market). Logic dictates one should focus a review on what the application says it sets out to do, and you do it in an unbiased manner. Basically what you provided here in this article is a review of Songbird for OSX as if OSX was a primary development target, which is ludicrous when you yourself are aware that Firefox even up until 3.0 was not entirely up to snuff visually for a lot of OSX users.
Kinda boils down to you expecting far more from this music player than it said it had. One look at the features page mentions absolutely nothing about anything you complain about being missing, with the exception of them stating video support and cd ripping are coming down the tube. And you use the fact that they have “Coming Soon” features at the bottom of the feature page as some sort of How Dare They, like they’re trying to hide something by merely putting it where it makes sense. Their website isn’t some DVD where Coming Attractions makes sense to put at the beginning, their website is there to convey information in the order which it should be conveyed. Here’s what we have, here’s what we are close to having, and here’s what we want to have.
Okay, I’ll just get into my time machine and hop back to 2001 and review Songbird 1.0 there.
Just playing music, Songbird was buggy and unpolished compared to iTunes. Now, I can choose to either live with those problems because my ideals lie with open music formats, or the web features, or I can continue to use the tool that already works for me.
If Songbird can provide a smooth playback experience in future versions, It’ll get a much more glowing review from me.
I have many criticisms of iTunes. It was good at 4.9 when they added Podcasting. The problem with iTunes is that you get what you’re lumped with and any flaws and bloat can’t be fixed by a wider community.
I expected it to play music, and didn’t do that all that smoothly.
I expected it to not import my videos, or somehow alert me clearly that video was not supported, but it didn’t – instead giving a subpar experience that could have easily been cleaned up by simply not including video files in the library.
I didn’t expect it to have an online store. I didn’t even mention that in the article.
*When* Songbird is a better player, I’ll give it better reception. But right now, I gave it a task to do and it didn’t do too well. Potential, resources, community or not – I can’t go recommend Songbird to my grandma based on the principle that it’s a small project written by a small group of people and it doesn’t work very well at the moment — but it will later.
*When* 2.0, 3.0 &c. is a good player, I’ll recommend it then.
We, the technical community understand audio formats, and are willing to contribute and put up with shortcomings — the public are not. If Songbird doesn’t work right, they go back to Windows Media Player or iTunes because Songbird “didn’t seem to work”.
addendum: Firefox 0.93 did everything better than IE for me.
Edited 2008-12-05 11:33 UTC
I’m just going to address your post paragraph by paragraph.
You miss the point entirely with your snide remark, my point was that iTunes development has taken course over a period of nearly 8 years, and you are expecting a fresh 1.0 release of this relatively new music player to stack up to its feature set. Do not pretend that you were reviewing it purely on the basis of “Hmmm, seems to play back the audio, we’re done here!”
I’m curious, what music formats did you have problems with in Songbird? It supports far more than your preferred iTunes. This is relevant because of this: “With the QuickTime Playback and Window Media Playback add-ons installed, Songbird can play all the popular music formats including MPEG Audio (mpga), MPEG Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG4 family including FairPlay (m4a, m4v, mp4, m4p, m4b), Ogg Vorbis, Speex, AAC, WMA, WMADRM, FLAC, and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR. If you’re a developer, teach Songbird how to play your favorite format!” source: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/what_digital_music_forma… Again, which format are you having difficulty playing back? If your gripe is with the program itself having shortcomings, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to even mention ideals lying with open formats, the point is irrelevant to the discussion because those are not the only ones Songbird supports.
Granted.
Criticisms of iTunes are not relevant to this discussion, the only reason I bring up how far along iTunes has come since 1.0 is to illustrate the point to you that development takes time and energy and community interest.
You did not expect it to play music, you expected it to do things that it never said it was meant to do, most notably video playback.
I have no idea how your Songbird both imported a video file and then proceeded to actually display it in your library listing. For one, there are no tags that I’m aware of to attach to a video file to display Artist, Album, Title. How did you find the video file in your playlist? I tried importing a folder full of avi/mpg videos and Songbird quietly did nothing because Import Media was never meant to process video files. You’re not that hung up on their usage of the word “Media” instead of “Music” are you?
I don’t remember ever mentioning anything about a store, and I personally couldn’t care less for an integrated store in a jukebox app, though I guess some people might find that to be a nice feature if they purchase music so regularly.
You are being intellectually dishonest by proclaiming Songbird is not ready for widespread usage because it didn’t work perfectly for you on your Mac. I’ll say it again, you are a niche market, there are many more people than you who are using a platform where Songbird has gotten more TLC. You know how you can make it better on your platform? By becoming involved. But if you’d rather keep using iTunes, that’s fine too, just don’t expect the world when developers only have so much time and so many systems to test on.
I find it amazing you continue to fly the flag of “Songbird is not functioning correctly!” when the fact of the matter is, for well over 90% of the potential market it has, it is functioning just fine. Stop pretending your Mac problems are indicative of the software on the whole.
Um… you’re comparing a relatively new 1.0 piece of software, to a much older and mature 8.0 piece of software. Do you really not see a problem there? The higher version (especially with such a difference in number) is obviously going to be more feature-rich and most well-tested version in most cases. It even has the added bonus of being pre-installed on every Mac, so surely they’ve hammered any major (and most minor) bugs.
I would be a bit curious (and not in a good way… skeptical would probably be a better word) if a new 1.0 product was every bit as fully-featured as iTunes. I would expect to see lots of major bugs, possibly instability, a weak GUI, and a poorly-designed program overall. Think Microsoft, or all the other crap that corporations like to shove in our face at a high price… over, and over, and over. [Unfortunately, not even open source is innocent of this.]
And why the hell do so many people think that and audio player should for whatever reason also be able to play video files? That’s one thing that really pissed me off about Winamp (plus many, many more things after that happened).
My background: I am an old Linux user (since 1995!) which has recently switched to Mac OS X. In the last five years I have ripped a large number of CDs from my collection. I keep them in a dedicated partition on my hard drive (6500 OGG files). I carefully designed the directory layout and avoided spaces in file names in order to ease backups. Each directory contains a “cover.jpg” file with the image of the CD cover. I used to run Exaile, which was more than happy to work with this configuration.
When a few weeks ago I copied my music to my new MacBook and fired iTunes, I discovered two problems: (1) it does not play OGG files, unless you download the decoder from Internet (which I promptly did), and (2) it forces you to “import” the files, i.e. to move them into newly created directories, with file names chosen by iTunes itself. The latter urged me to seek for alternatives.
I tried to install Amarok, but was scared by the fact that it depends on a lot of KDE libraries and there is no automated install process yet. So I decided to try Songbird. The two iTunes problems do not apply with Songbird: (1) it can read my OGG files without any additional plugin, and (2) it happly reads my files where they are without the need to copy and rename them. So I decided to stay with Songbird.
However, there are a few issues: (1) the Macbook multimedia keys are ignored (this is a known bug), (2) creating playlists is not as easy and quick as it is in Amarok and Exaile, (3) there is apparently no way to see the OSD rectangle which announces the new track to be played, and (4) it apparently ignores the “cover.jpg” file I put in each directory. If I manually import it, Songbird copies the cover into the OGG files, which is something I dislike and find quite annoying!
My conclusion is that Songbird is not the optimal solution to listen my music yet, but I will be using it waiting for an easy-to-install Amarok DMG file!
This is something that I don’t understand about a bunch of different “media managers”. I don’t want to create a new directory tree that is my collection. I already have that. And I especially don’t want the different users on my home system to have their own separate directory trees with copies of the same music files in them. That’s why we have a central file server at home.
I just want a media manager that will look at a directory tree, import the metadata about the files in there, and let me create a library based on those files. BUT DON’T MOVE/COPY THE FILES!! Why is that so hard for media manager developers to figure out?
Amarok’s a decent media player … but it’s a horrible media manager. The “collection” is nothing more than a directory browser. You can’t even edit any metadata (id tags, filename, etc) from within it.
If Songbird gets ports to FreeBSD as a native app, I may look at it. I’m running out of alternatives (GTK, and especially GNOME, apps are not alternatives.)
Right click->Edit information for X tracks?
Maybe it could have been implented so you could edit that inside the very collection tree, but I don’t see how that could have been done without adding clutter to the interface.
More so when, as it is right now, edit information doesn’t just mean id tags but also lyrics and labels.
What really irks me about the interface is that the playlist is the centre of everything, instead of the collection. A playlist is a temporary thing, it changes constantly, and is only ever looked at while creating it or changing tracks. Why is that the centrepiece of the app?
If they swapped the “Collection” tree with the playlist, making the collection the centre of everything, then it would be simple to make the list editable. Just like any other file listing in Konq/Dolphin. No clutter required.
Then, the playlist is just a little thing off to the side, where it belongs.
and (2) it forces you to “import” the files, i.e. to move them into newly created directories, with file names chosen by iTunes itself. The latter urged me to seek for alternatives.
Ran into the same thing with an external HD loaded with mp3s attached to a Mac. But I seem to remember I was able to tell it not to move the files and just index them where they were.
Of course, it bothered me that was the default, but it makes sense with what they are doing. You deal with music with your music app, not the filemanager. Photos with your photo app, not the filemanager. And of course there’s spotlight if you actually do need to find a file for some strange reason.
Apparently directory trees are too hard to understand (see the many recent filemanagers that do away with it), and seeing the average computer user flail around when I ask them where something is installed, Apple might be on to something. Let the music manager handle the music, but leave the option for us to organize it ourselves into directories and whatever. And like I said, I’m pretty sure that option is there.
The option is in iTunes preferences under advanced, and is called “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” Interestingly enough, the defaults for this option are different between Windows and Mac–Mac’s default is to have this option enabled, while on Windows it’s the opposite. You can also disable the automatic organizing of your music files–again, Mac’s default is enabled while the opposite holds true for Windows. Perhaps they could have made these options a bit more obvious, but they are there and aren’t hidden. Personally, I leave this on, but that’s because I’m a very disorganized person when it comes to files, I tend to throw music randomly into whatever folder I’m downloading to and think that I’ll deal with it later… everyone can guess the rest I’m sure, I never end up dealing with it. So iTunes, in my case, is a life saver for sure.
That being said, iTunes isn’t exactly the best player for ogg files. You can download the QT plugin and enable it, and they play fine, but a lot of the metadata doesn’t seem to work, but I could just be doing something wrong. Usually for oggs I end up using VLC, and you might want to consider that if you don’t want a music manager but just want a player for your audio and video files. Plus, it plays just about everything out there with the exception, obviously, of any protected content.
You mentioned that iTunes once supported FLAC: “Between users hurt by Apple removing FLAC from iTunes, and supporters of open formats like OGG” (p. 2). When did they start supporting it? When did they end FLAC support? Have they supported other royalty-free codecs in the past (like Vorbis)? Some URLs for reference would be helpful. I’ve been unable to find any concrete information on this myself.
I had an iPod 3G in 2003, and I’m sure that it supported FLAC. Suport was later removed from iTunes in favour of the Apple Lossless Codec (iTunes 4.5 / Qt 6.5)
It’s basically so long ago, I can’t find any mention of it. I wish I’d kept my original iPod box. Anybody else able to confirm or deny this?
Unfortunately, I found this review far more reactionary than informative. A good iTunes / Songbird comparison would have been a great article.
This part bothered me the most:
Hmm, checked by default. Personally, I’d close and remove the app right now. I find that kind of behaviour massively disrespectful. Real were pulling this stunt years ago and I still don’t trust any software that asks for an email address, optional or not.
The reason Real got in trouble is because they were sending a GUID with the metrics. In other words, their metrics were not anonymous. These metrics are and as such, have nothing to do with Real or those privacy issues. Continuing with a random opinion about generally not trusting software that has a way for you to put in an email address certainly wasn’t helpful.
Privacy issues can be complicated and important. Misinformed side-comments like these create more confusion instead of clarity.
Edited 2008-12-07 01:42 UTC
Despite the issues that I’ll describe later, Songbird’s developers have done really nice job, especially the default Mac-like interface look-and-feel. Pros – many features in one windows – lyrics, band info, upcoming events, tickets, etc. Good. The mini player – beautiful feature. Add-ons – good, very nice, although most of them are very useless.
Cons – terrible performance on Linux, on a pretty powerful machine with OpenSuSE 11.0, KDE 3.5.9. Installation needs improvement, printing debug info in the terminal isn’t useful for me
it’s eating a lot of resources – almost 30-40 % of the CPU, I don’t care about the RAM, as I have 3 GB. Startup time – very slow. Switching windows and opening some menus and preferences – really slow. Moving the main window around – very slow. Overall performance – very bad. Amarok beats it here, with lot.
Usability – this is what I can’t bear – I want to queue a file – I can’t just click on it, and enqueue it. I have to create playlist. Mmmm, no thanks. I want to get rid of all windows or some of them – I can’t. I just don’t want this info or empty field standing there. I can’t customize shortcuts – biggest downside. I can’t control songs with shortcuts outside of the window – reference – amarok can do “Win+B” for the next song, Win+C to pause it, while you’re browsing in Firefox, can low down the volume, so that you can hear yourself thinking, etc.
Needs improvements, good job though. I will stay with amarok for the next releases, or at least until those features aren’t included. I don’t want to change my habits.