Just before Christmas Songbird 1.4.0 was released, and a new fix versions was released today as 1.4.3. Songbird now supports MSC storage devices and CD ripping, bringing the app one step closer to replacing iTunes for some users. What’s particularly interesting is that Songbird now specifically pushes their product against users of Android, Nokia and Palm smartphones — which is something I also suggested a few months too. Hopefully Google, Nokia, and Palm will get behind the small team in San Francisco to help out the cause, since it’s also on their best interest too.
Songbird 1.4.x Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I can’t pinpoint any singular reason, but I find Songbird to be awful. I was really excited when the project was first announced, a xulrunner media player sounded awesome because Firefox was a FOSS darling. Fast forward to today and it now just sounds silly. I just installed it on a Pentium M laptop with 1.5GB RAM and it really makes things crawl. Not really sure where they are trying to go.
What I find awful about it is the fact that a feature will appear on the Windows version and it’ll take at least a year before it finally appears on the *NIX or Mac version. Yet again the non-Windows platforms are seen as the bastard red headed step children of the operating system world.
Edited 2009-12-31 02:55 UTC
Have you tried Banshee? It is a first rate media player in my mind. Amarok 2 is slowly recovering as well, though it may be a while before old timers are truly happy.
I’ve tried Banshee in the past but it was horrible in terms of locking up with large libraries. As for Amarok 2, I haven’t given it a go. For me, I have a Mac and only use it for the library function; for ripping I prefer using XLD which enables me to rip CD’s with true VBR rather than the constrained VBR which iTunes employs.
I wish and I hope that maybe the massive gap between iTunes releases is because Apple are re-writing it in Cocoa and hopefully we’ll see CoreData being used to index music rather than the almighty massive XML file that is used right now.
It IS slow (P4 at 3Ghz here). But then again, iTunes doesn’t fly on Windows either.
And besides, that’s why I wrote that Palm, Google and Nokia should HELP these guys. Because they already have done the bulk of the work, and they have the framework, all it now requires is polish.
I second that; if Palm, Google and Nokia each contributed 2 full time programmers each; and dedicated to getting across the board feature parity and support for my iPod Touch – I for one would be more than happy to leave the iTunes world; the unfortunate problem that as a Mac user I am treated like a second class citizen when it comes to features when compared to the Windows version of songbird.
Edited 2009-12-31 03:12 UTC
Why would Nokia want to help Songbird?
There are already the following very capable players that run purely on Nokia’s platform (which is Qt):
VLC
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
SMPlayer
http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/
qmmp (like Winamp, lightweight)
http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index_en.php
cuberok (like Amarok, no KDE dependency, works on Mac)
http://code.google.com/p/cuberok/
Quasar (for handhelds)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/quasar-media-player
and the following which also require kdelibs as well as Qt:
Amarok (the most capable, works with iPods)
http://amarok.kde.org/
Juk (KDE 3.x)
http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html
All of these media players (some of them are also music collection managers) work far faster than Songbird.
Most of them require only Nokia’s Qt platform (which includes Windows, Mac and Linux).
Edited 2009-12-31 04:43 UTC
Your comment makes no sense. Just because Songbird doesn’t run on Qt doesn’t make it useless for Nokia. None of the players you mention have all the features of Songbird. Amarok is close, but it is not ported to Mac/Win to run on its own, AFAIK.
As for Songbird not being fast: iTunes is not fast either on Windows. Didn’t stop it.
Songbird requirements are too steep for almost all of Nokia’s devices:
http://getsongbird.com/system-requirements.php
The features that Songbird appears to support:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29#Featur…
that are not supported by faster players are DRM-related (including Fariplay and Windows Media DRM on Windows platforms).
Songbird appears to be constrained to x86(-64) architectures (probably due to DRM and binary codecs):
All things considered, especially considering Nokia’s current multimedia devices (which are mostly not x86)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N900
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N97
The one exception might be the Nokia Booklet 3G which uses an Atom processor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_booklet_3g
Given that most of Nokia’s multimedia devices either won’t run Songbird, or won’t run it well, and also given that Nokia could choose from a growing selection of quality Qt-based software, Nokia’s choices for media players probably wouldn’t include Songbird.
PS: media players specifically designed for Maemo include:
http://maemo.org/downloads/OS2008/multimedia/
Kagu, Canola2, UKMP, Mplayer, KMplayer, WorldTV99, YouAmp and MediaBox.
Edited 2009-12-31 06:37 UTC
>Songbird requirements are too steep for almost all of Nokia’s devices:
What in the love of God are you talking about????
Nobody is talking here about porting that app on cellphones!!!! We’re talking about a DESKTOP COMPANION app, like iTunes. How fast (or not) is the cellphone makes no difference whatsoever, because Songbird is supposed to run only on a desktop OS. This is an iTunes replacement app, not a cellphone media player app! 😮
We are in need of an iTunes replacement, a **sync** app, not a new media player for cellphones.
Nokia. Perhaps also Qt, and Maemo, which are Nokia’s platforms.
Nokia happen to make cellphones, it happens to be their primary business.
Now, with that fact in our minds, I will repeat my question … why would Nokia spend their money on helping Songbird?
Edited 2009-12-31 06:42 UTC
>I will repeat my question … why would Nokia spend their money on helping Songbird?
Because if Nokia wants to survive the current smartphone onslaught, they will have to fix their freaking usability and services (something that only very recently figured out that they should do).
And one of the main things people want to do with their phones these days, is having a great mp3 experience, similar to that of the iPod’s.
And creating a spiffy mp3 player is only 50% of the job. The other 50% is the SYNC application. Since Nokia phones don’t work with iTunes, and using Explorer to drag n drop mp3s is less than ideal for most people who already use iTunes, a new sync app is needed. And the only sync app that is an iTunes clone and it works, is Songbird.
Do I really need to make everything so clear for you to understand all these basic things? Qt, non-Qt, doesn’t freaking matter. What matters is what customers need and what customers get. And it’s CHEAPER to contribute to Songbird rather than write such an app yourself. It took Songbird 4 years now to get to this stage. Do you think that the current slaughtering of Symbian in the market has 4 years to waste?
I’d guess not.
I’m out.
You don’t need a sync app with a non-iPod multimedia device.
You just drag & drop media files from your desktop multimedia collection to your device.
Amarok will do this for you nicely. If you really meant “sync”, you could just use Krusader and any number of media players for Maemo.
Why do you insist that everything is so complicated? It isn’t, you know. You don’t need iTunes, nor a iTunes clone, unless perhaps you buy in to iPods.
Nokia’s multimedia devices are iPod and iTunes competitors, not clones.
Edited 2009-12-31 06:58 UTC
>You don’t need a sync app with a non-iPod multimedia device.
Didn’t you get the memo about it, mentioned above, about how slow it is to work with 16+ GB storage files on the same folder? And do you think that consumers of 2010 want to use a file manager while iTunes does it better? Do you think that consumers are a geek like you using different utilities or commands to do the job of a single app? They’re not, so get a clue.
ALL smartphone platforms are in grave need of a sync app atm. That includes Nokia. And Songbird is the closest app to that realization. That’s the bottom line.
Leaving this discussion now, because you just don’t get it at all. You are just like those osnews commenters that I’ve battled since 2001. I thought that in year 2009 smarter people who understand consumers would comment on this site, but I guess I was wrong.
http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/n97/how-to/music-fo…
Enjoy.
Here I am explaining to you why file manager-style music syncing is NOT what people want (exactly because it’s cumbersome and limited to what it can do with mp3/aac metadata/playlists), and that is slow on large storage devices (especially on FAT32 filesystems), and there you are, replying with a link to Nokia’s site that just shows how to use a file manager. And you have the audacity to even say “enjoy”.
This is like telling you that military uniforms should have shades of green in the jungle, and you reply with a link to the latest colorful Dolce & Gabbana collection.
Are you daft? Should I just put you on /ignore? Or are you doing this on purpose? You are certainly a mystery.
Edited 2009-12-31 09:03 UTC
Whatever.
You do not need a SYNC program if you use a Nokia device as your portable media player device, because the Nokia portable media player device itself doesn’t support it.
That is the point I am making.
Now, given that Nokia devices don’t support syncing, the point is perfectly valid that you can put an Audio CD in your CDROM drive, connect your Nokia portable device, and then open Konqueror and split the windows. Then with one pane navigate to the Nokia device, and with the other pane navigate to the AudioCD shown as mp3 files. Select the mp3 folder, drag and drop, and you are done … Audio CD ripped, copied and transferred in the one operation.
You can do something similar with Amarok.
You can’t do it with iTunes and an iPod if the CD producer is at all precious.
http://ipod.about.com/od/gettingsongsoffyourcds/ss/ripping_cds.htm
And in any event you can’t do it with iTunes and an iPod in the one operation … you have to import the CD into iTunes (if iTunes lets you) and then later you have to sync iTunes with your iPod.
Edited 2009-12-31 12:42 UTC
This DRM is no longer in use, Sony got rather imfamous for it several years ago in fact and it was far from iTunes specific. It was basically designed to prevent importing of any kind, designed to seriously destroy your fair use. The backlash was so bad that Sony actually had to provide removal software for this rootkit-based DRM.
While we’re talking about two step processes though… Rip CD, sync to iPod versus rip CD and copy files to Nokia device. Hmm, both look like they have the same number of steps to me: two. Surely you don’t want me to ask the next question about counting…
A good number of CDs have a data track at the beginning that only a computer will see … a normal CD player will skip right over it and start playing the next real AudioCD track.
Closed-source operating systems will “honour” the data track on the AudioCD on a computer, and give you no access to the real Audio CD data. The data track will have only low-quality mp3 files, and may even have information which tells a closed-source OS that the maker of the CD does not want these files copied to any storage devices … play only.
An open source OS OTOH can just ignore all this nonsense and read both the data track and the real AudioCD tracks.
No, it is one step. Konqueror will shown an AudioCD as a series of pseudo-folders, one of which is the real AudioCD raw data, and others are mere representations of what the CD would contain if it were ripped to mp3 files or FLAC files or whatever.
It looks like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Konqi-audiocd.png
The “files” are the real audio tracks as .wav files. The folders labelled FLAC, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis respectively aren’t real folders, as they don’t exist on the CD. They are the pseudo-folders.
Now if you were to use this Konqueror view to copy such a pseudo-folder to another storage area (such as a portable media player) then Konqueror will rip the AudioCD, encode it and transfer it to that other storage area in one operation. It is euqivalent to saving the encoded files that result from the ripping straight away on the portable media device, without any intermediate step.
Dolphin has exactly the same functionality, so you can use that instead of Konqueror if you want. AFAIK, Krusader also has this “audiocd:/” pseudo-file manager functionality.
Edited 2009-12-31 14:18 UTC
Eugenia, you might as well give up. I’d have thought you’d have been around here long enough to know what Lemur is like when he’s set on something. It’s like having an argument with a religious fundamentalist, it’ll only get you blue in the face and angry.
Deflection. Doesn’t answer the actual point … Nokia devices used as portable media players don’t support syncing with either iTunes or with Songbird.
So why should Nokia spend money on Songbird? Perhaps to help Apple sell more iPods and iPhones to Linux desktop users? I don’t think so.
Edited 2009-12-31 12:47 UTC
So why should Nokia spend money on Songbird? Perhaps to help Apple sell iPods and iPhones? I don’t think so.
To make it support syncing in the future? D’oh.
The Nokia portable media player devices and smartphones don’t support syncing, they support only plain media-file transfers. All the work in the world on Songbird won’t change that.
D’oh yourself.
Edited 2009-12-31 12:52 UTC
The Nokia portable media player devices don’t support syncing, they support only plain media file transfers. All the work in the world on Songbird won’t change that.
Doh yourself.
You’re really dense. Do you think Nokia will never be releasing any kind of new hardware again in the future? Yes? Exactly; they will sooner or later launch a device with some sort of syncing support and they’ll need one or another application to do the syncing. The easiest way to do that is to sponsor some existing application to add that functionality.
Then they will surely do that in the future for an application that runs natively on Nokia’s own platform. For Nokia portable media player devices and smartphones, that platform is Qt/Maemo.
The most natural existing application (on the Nokia device end) is this one:
http://maemo.nokia.com/features/media-player/
Nokia giving money to support the Songbird project makes no sense (to Nokia) whatsoever. That is the point.
Why is this so hard to expalin?
Edited 2009-12-31 13:09 UTC
Then they will surely do that in the future for an application that runs natively on Nokia’s own platform. For Nokia portable media players device and smartphones, that platform is Qt/Maemo.
The most natural existing application (on the Nokia device end) is this one:
http://maemo.nokia.com/features/media-player/
Nokia giving money to support the Songbird project makes no sense (to Nokia) whatsoever. That is the point.
Why is this so hard to expalin?
Who was claiming they’d port Songbird to their devices? They’ll need an application that runs on the desktop and does the syncing. Songbird happens to run on several platforms so it’s a good choice for that. Not to mention it being open-source. Amarok doesn’t cut it because it relies on a lot more than just Qt.
But Songbird (on the desktop) supports iPods and iPhones.
It turns out, funnily enough, that Nokia’s best interest is for people not to buy iPods and iPhones.
So Nokia won’t support Songbird, plain and simple.
Nokia might, however, support development of a good cross-platform desktop multimedia application that supported syncing to Nokia devices but NOT to iPhones and iPods.
PS: Nokia apparently doesn’t like Apple.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/nokia-hurls-new-salvo-in-…
Edited 2009-12-31 14:45 UTC
Wtf does supporting iPhone have to do with supporting other devices? It could just as easily support any device you want, and it’s far from just iPod and iPhone owners who enjoy the syncing experience or Palm Pre wouldn’t be bothering with it. Granted Palm is going about it in the wrong way but that’s not to deminish the fact that mass storage copying is not an effective way to manage a music collection that is large when you’ve got a device that can’t hold it all. It was efficient several years ago, but these days no one wants to go through their music collection folder by folder and file by file, and why should they? I have over 40 gb of music, and these days that is seen as a medium-sized boardering on small music library. Seven years back I had 8 gB of music and a 20 gB mp3 player that used mass-storage which, given the size, worked great then. My library was considered fairly large back then, mind you. The library to device size ratio is much different now, that’s why syncing came into being in the first place. It’s not like Apple invented the idea of syncing your device, they just happened to be the first company to market a media playback device that was seriously embraced by the masses… and it used the sync concept. It’s nice for other things these days too, I have to say I find it extremely handy that my iPhone syncs my unplayed Podcast episodes with iTunes ehwn I plug it in. I had a mass-storage player prior to this and had to copy podcasts manually, positions weren’t saved either. I’ve got loads of Audiobooks and guess what, syncing also saves my last position so that I can pick up where I left off but on a different device.
You may doubt that Nokia will want devices to have syncing capabilities, but don’t be surprised if Nokia is actually looking forward instead of backward. Like it or not, most people expect some kind of sync capabilities in their media devices these days. Blame it on the iPod if you want, but that doesn’t change the facts. Songbird would simply be an ideal codebase for Nokia to work from if they were intending to produce their own manager in many respects. It’s cross-platform, has support for a good many file formats, and already has a framework for synchronization built in. It is, after all, open source so they could always remove iPod support in their own fork. They were speculating, as were you or are you a Nokia employee with insider info saying they will never update their devices with synchronization capabilities, nor include it in their new devices? Note: We’re talking about a *desktop* side sync program which has *nothing, nothing at all* to do with QT or Maemo.
Who said anything about “folder by folder, file by file”? Just plain copy the whole ~/Music directory structure (if that is where you keep it) across in one drag-and-drop operation.
Regardless of your conjectures here, Nokia’s current devices do not support “syncing”. They support only simple file transfers, as if the device’s memory were a simple USB disk or USB memory stick.
Really, I just don’t understand this insistence some people seem to have on chaining themselves to DRM-encumbered iTunes. There is more to life that “sync”. There really is.
Plug in a portable media player device into a USB port. Open with the Dolphin File manager. Click the “Split” icon (so you get two panes both showing the portable media player device). Open the CD drawer, place a CD in the drawer, and close the drawer. Wait a second or two as the CD is read, until the AudioCD icon appears on the left-hand side of the Dolphin File Manager. Click on the AudioCD icon. Wait another few seconds while Dolphin reads the CD and fetches information from an online CD database.
Now you will have two panes in Dolphin, one showing the AudioCD, and another showing the portable media device. Drag the “MP3” folder from the AudioCD and and drop it on the “Music” folder of the portable player device pane. Wait for a minute or so as Dolphin rips the CD, encodes it as Mp3 files and stores them on the portable media player device.
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/?Qwd=./Transfer_without_sync&Qiv=n…
That’s it, people. One dead simple drag and drop operation straight from the CD to the portable media player. One can also use Dolphin’s drag and drop in a similar fashion to save the CD to disk as a folder4 of MP3 files, or to send any previously-saved folder of MP3 files to the portable media player device, or to delete anything already on the portable media player device in order to free up space. Easy peasy. Faster than iTunes, and no DRM gotcha’s involved.
My granny could do it.
What is it with all this “import to iTunes” (provided the DRM lest you) and then later “sync” stuff? Why make it so complicated and hard to use for people? I just don’t get it, really.
It seems to me that Nokia have zero interest in the Songbird codebase.
A *desktop* side sync program has *nothing, nothing at all* to do with Nokia’s portable devices, either.
Edited 2010-01-01 11:43 UTC
Firstly, Songbird does NOT support iPhone or iPod Touch.
Second, Songbird are no longer supporting or developing the iPod sync add-on, relegating it to the same status as any browser add-on.
You can add those to the ways in which you’ve made yourself look silly in this thread.
I wish Al Gore would give me the power to reach across tcp/ip and smack some sense into you.
But Songbird (on the desktop) supports iPods and iPhones.
It doesn’t.
It turns out, funnily enough, that Nokia’s best interest is for people not to buy iPods and iPhones.
So Nokia won’t support Songbird, plain and simple.
Nokia might, however, support development of a good cross-platform desktop multimedia application that supported syncing to Nokia devices but NOT to iPhones and iPods.
Actually, it would be in Nokia’s best interest if they got a player/music manager which did support also iPods and iPhones. Reason is rather simple: market saturation. Or to put it more clearly, the more devices the application supports the more likely it will gather a good, large userbase. The larger the userbase the easiser it is for Nokia to bring out phones or other devices with sync support and have people use them for their music playing needs.
Trying to lock people in when you don’t even have any userbase yet will not work. It’s easier to support everyone, get a large userbase, start populating the market with your devices, and then see if you can start the lock-in process.
PS: Nokia apparently doesn’t like Apple
Everyone knows that. For example my current favorite gadget, the Nokia N900, doesn’t support multitouch because of Apple.
But you don’t need to like someone to benefit from them. Just lure their users/customers to support your devices too and you’ve suddenly got lots of opportunities for making money.
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/12
OK, it used to out of the box. Now apparently that support has been relegated to a community-supported add-on.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
I wonder why this is so?
Have Apple been obfuscating the interfaces, again? Sigh! Why do people buy this kind of lock-in rubbish?
Edited 2010-01-01 15:25 UTC
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/12
OK, it used to out of the box. Now apparently that support has been relegated to a community-supported add-on.
I just checked that site and searched all the comments, it doesn’t support iPod Touch nor iPhone. Only the original iPods.
Have Apple been obfuscating the interfaces, again? Sigh! Why do people buy this kind of lock-in rubbish?
Because there was no open-source phone with as good usability, powerful hardware and multitouch features when iPhone came out so it could grab itself a huge amount of users and generate itself an enormous amount of PR, all spread by the users themselves for free.
And because none of the open-source music players/managers don’t have such an extensive online music shop as iTunes has. People like to buy songs online these days for a lot of reasons, but one of the largest reasons being the fact that they can get exactly and only the songs they like, not the whole album of which they don’t like all the songs there, and thus save money and have a cleaner collection, too.
And yes, before you start frothing again, I know f.ex. Rhythmbox supports several online music stores which do not do DRM. But those stores are very small and do not have the popular bands there whereas the iTunes store does.
Oh, and one more thing: you dodged nicely my answer about why Nokia actually would benefit from a music player which did support syncing with iPods and iPhones, too.
Seriously, I’ve given up trying to get through to people on this topic.
Let’s just agree to say that the proof of this point will be in the pudding, and we will all wait to see if Nokia eventually do, or do not, ever offer financial support to the Songbird project, hey.
Forget Nokia for just a second. What about Palm? Surely, Palm could benefit from contributing to Songbird right? Now, imagine if Palm contributed, and then Nokia and Google jumped on board as well. Who would that help the most? The consumer. One app to manage transferring large amounts of music and other media such as videos to phones.
Why do we need this? I don’t know about you, but when I used a nokia e62, it was a pain trying to transfer exactly what I wanted from my laptop to my phone through a file manager. Say I wanted albums from a specific genre, but I only organized my music by artists. What do I do? Reorganize everything? What if my music collection is 22gb and over 3500 songs? iTunes lets me just select songs/albums from a certain genre and copy them regardless of how they are organized in directories. Thats why we need this.
Palm KNOWS this. Thats why they want to hop on the iTunes bandwagon, but Apple won’t let them.
Now, imagine this. If Nokia, Palm, and Google all got behind Songbird, it could also become a single distribution point for apps for all those platforms. The app store could host multiple binaries of the same app for each platform and you could just buy it. Developers would benefit immensely. It would save them time from having to get their app into each individual store, especially if they have already ported it to the different platforms.
There are a ton of benefits for Nokia, Palm, and Google if they support Songbird. You are just being too closed minded to see them.
This is extremely hilarious. Here, let me put it in simple terms:
Nokia won’t port Songbird to QT/Maemo. Songbird would be the desktop app, will do the syncing from the *desktop* side. Get it now? Simple enough?
No, sorry, but it is you who doesn’t get it.
Nokia won’t support Songbird, because Songbird supports Nokia’s direct competition (iPhones and iPods). If Songbird becomes a hit and has great polish, and it is a free multi-platform application, then there will be a lot less people who would then have no reason not to buy an iPhone or an iPod, and they may not decide to buy a Nokia device.
Sheesh.
Edited 2009-12-31 14:32 UTC
The guide does not show how to move music released in the 80’s or music with a genre of Blues without going through folders…
… Unless there is an additional video and writing batch script for this task.
I think the point is, we all hate the pointless protocols that Apple uses to lock its iPods to iTunes. But a front end just to copy the files across onto the mass storage device based on your selection criteria seems better when you have a limited space on the portable device and a “large” collection of music.
That’s exactly what normal people do not wish to do….
And having to use a file manager to do that can be a serious hassle, too, for example if your music files are not all properly organized, or if you only want songs from a certain year, or genre, or if you have lots of compilations and you only want songs from certain artists.. All those cases would be a pain in the ass to do with a file manager, and none of those cases are exactly rare or uncommon.
Absolutely agreed! Ask why Apple has de facto monopoly in the portable music/online media sales business. The reason is not in their great player but the whole hub integrates perfectly in too many aspects.
One can not beat Apple by providing non-integrated bits of some awful download client and messy device syncing application. It must be one-click solution and Songbird is in the position of being cross-platform middleware (between media source and portable device) with some additional nice features.
The reason I don’t use Songbird is because it doesn’t play well in my media hub which is podcast RSS – X – iPod. The iPod is only there because of the X part.
I think you need to get some orientation here. Read the news in the past year with Palm almost getting sued for using iTunes. The problem for Palm, Android, and Nokia is that they don’t have a good, multi-platoform iTunes-CLONE for their users to use with their mp3 smartphones. And Songbird is coming very close to that realization. It’s the ONLY app that does, because it’s multi-platform, and it operates like iTunes, which is what users want. That’s what we are talking about here. Not a new media player for cellphones. Each cellphone can have any media player it wants to have, it’s irrelevant.
It only becomes relevant, if having an actual new protocol (like iPods have one) to store music in databases, that might make it faster on players with over 16 GBs of storage (MPT/MSC are very slow at over 16 GBs). Only in that case, a new protocol might need to be created, and it would benefit everyone if it’s a protocol accepted by all new players and smartphones. But other than that, what you wrote about Qt and porting Songbird to cellphones is not what we’re talking about here.
I think you need to get some orientation here.
Your statement was:
In fact, because Songbird has steep requirements, doesn’t run on cellphones (which Nokia make, BTW), supports iPods and appears to be constrained to x86, it actually makes Songbird competition for Nokia.
Nokia makes its own portable media devices. iPods (and iPhones) are also competition.
There are a lot of online media services which are not itunes, (some shown here)
http://amarok.kde.org/en/features
and if you also own a desktop as well as your portable media device, then ripping a CD is another great source of quality legal music whose only drawback is that it is not online and instant.
Edited 2009-12-31 07:01 UTC
My personal favorite: MOC / MOCP http://moc.daper.net/
iTunes is being used by people now, comes with every iPod and has a massive installed base. Quite how you figure people are going to use a cheap knock-off that has all the performance and arcane issues of any XUL application I don’t know. We also have a ton of other media players, particularly on Windows, such as Winamp should people wish to use them. Sync? People are already using iTunes for that.
No one is terribly interested that it is just as slow as iTunes. It will make no one switch, not that they would anyway.
Palm, Google and Nokia don’t give a shit because it’s not quite that important to them and the framework is a pile of dog turd that is trying to compete with a firmly entrenched existing application in iTunes. The thing choked on getting through a quarter of my music collection that Winamp has happily imported in for years. I don’t know why you think it would be important to these companies since it’s all been done before. If they want to create such a player then I’m sure they can make a better job.
There is very little point to Songbird. We have applications like Winamp as alternative players and there have been many, many efforts to create alternative iTunes knock-offs and iPod sync alternatives.
I would rather Palm, Google, or Nokia help XBMC get syncing support since it already has polish.
I’ve always found it silly to integrate a full freaking web-browser with a music collection manager/player. It’s a whole lot of unneeded stuff, especially since I doubt anyone actually uses it for browsing the web, instead opting for a separate browser.
I still use Songbird, it’s less of a memory hog than iTunes, but it’s still awfully slow and seems to actually be more of a CPU hog, especially scrolling the list of songs you’ve got almost hurts.
I’d ditch it if I could, but I haven’t found any other player with a similar UI. They all try to look like Winamp and I hate the Winamp UI. I like having a clear view of all of my songs, a search for whenever I want to listen to a particular song, and so that I can sort my songs by the score I’ve given them.
I personally use iTunes. It has 3-4 small bugs, but other than that, it does the job perfectly for me.
iTunes would be good if it wasn’t Apple product and if it wasn’t so god damn resource-heavy :/ It seems it’s impossible to get a plain music player/manager, without browsers, without video playback, without kitchen sink..
These days it’s close to impossible to get anything without being forced to get the kitchen sink with it. Honestly, the only music player that I can think of which has a somewhat similar UI to iTunes and yet doesn’t come with the kitchen sink is Rhythmbox. It’s a music player, pure and simple, with some functionality for utilizing some iPod models. No video, no web browser.
Too bad it’s basically been abandoned, I really enjoyed using it though it’s still useable for the moment.
I actually have always loved Rhythmbox. It’s fast, sleek, has really clean and clear UI, it’s stable, and it’s non-bloated. But the issue is, it’s a Linux app. It’s not available for Windows.
I could make the exact same argument when it comes to WinAMP or iTunes, but in reverse. And, technically, Rhythmbox is not a *Linux* app it’s a *GNOME* app, which means it’ll run on any platform you care to get GNOME running on. And yes, that’d mean Windows too if you really wanted to, would be a bit of an effort just for a music player app though. Thing is, the “Oh, it doesn’t run on my os of choice” bit doesn’t really matter. Use the os with the most apps you need, but recognize that you will not have access to others. Can’t have everything
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Use the os with the most apps you need, but recognize that you will not have access to others. Can’t have everything
Unfortunately. If I could have what I wanted, I’d have Linux with GNOME as desktop, but with all the games and gaming performance of Windows.
Rhythmbox isn’t abandoned that’s a novell lie so that they get banshee as the default player on ubuntu and other dists
Do you have a source for that claim? Only asking because it sounds a bit odd to me that Novell would do such a thing. I’ve not read of any bad blood between the two projects. Personally I prefer Rhythmbox as it seems more stable, though I do like Banshee’s feature set and visual style.
Besides, why would Novell care what the default is on Ubuntu and other distros? I’d think they would concentrate on their own distro and let others do as they please. After all, it’s not like they make any real money off of Banshee development.
Winamp was one of the major losses I was forced to deal with in my switch to Linux back around 2006. I never did like the idea of a media library, that’s what my damn file system is for–it’s all nicely organized by genre, band, year/album, and finally song.
I don’t know how Winamp’s UI is not clear, as you load files (typically, in my case, an album) into a playlist and don’t have to worry about a bunch of useless metadata all over the screen about all the songs in your collection. Of course, since WA5 Windamp does provide that pointless “library” functionality, so you can have it either way.
Winamp is, IMO, the best. Though Audacious seems to be the next best thing.
Winamp was one of the major losses I was forced to deal with in my switch to Linux back around 2006.
I only know of XMMS, but I think it’s more or less a direct clone of Winamp. I know there are others too, but I don’t know the names.
I don’t know how Winamp’s UI is not clear, as you load files (typically, in my case, an album) into a playlist and don’t have to worry about a bunch of useless metadata all over the screen about all the songs in your collection. Of course, since WA5 Windamp does provide that pointless “library” functionality, so you can have it either way.
The problem with Winamp is that I don’t do playlists. I like to have my whole music collection right there, every single song, and I play them in random order. Oh, I also have the habit of rating my songs and ordering my collection based on the rating, with the best songs at the top and easily accessible. Whenever I want to play a particular song which isn’t in the view I just click on the search field and type in the name, doubleclick the song, and clear the search again. Winamp however insists on always creating a new playlist whenever I do that and then I have to import all of my songs again. It’s really annoying.
Errrrrr, you can do that. You have one local media list that you can go through and sort.
Errrrrr, you can do that as well and at the very least list the most played tunes you have in your collection.
I don’t know what you’re doing with Winamp but you’re doing it wrong.
Lack of musepack support renders songbird useless to me.
what’s with the chrome metal and cheesy band graphics? did they lose a UI designer?
edit: just found the Gonzo feather. it’s not too bad but the old one was better. now.. how to turn off the embarrassing splash screen with the U2 guy in the ski hat.
edit 2: thankfully the cheesy splash screen is only for cheesy windows users like me. and there’s a plugin to change it.
Edited 2009-12-31 05:55 UTC
Killed it after 10 minutes or so it took to import a quarter of my music folder – going to stay with winamp, obviously.
1.4 takes for every to load on my machines, while 1.1.2 was fast. I also see they took out last.fm radio, which is a huge bummer for me. I do hope they will implement podcasting support soon.
The removal of last.fm radio is actually last.fm’s fault since they restricted access to the radio for non paying customers. Also they are going to remove their old radio API, which Songbird probably used
It’s just too bad that the application does not work
Just downloaded it and unpacked the tar ball only to receive a crapload of warnings (mostly GStreamer-WARNING) and then having the application die on apparently a symbol lookup error.
Shame cause I would have given it a serious try. I finally want a Linux media player that can handle enormous libraries and playlists.
At this point 32gb of music on my N900 runs way better then any application desktop linux got to offer
I would recommend not using tarballs and look at your distros repository and install from there. There are probably some configuration hooks that are different on your distro vs. the tar ball install.
Fat lot of good that’ll do if your distro doesn’t have it.
I don’t like songbird because it’s slow and bloated.
I find Foobar2000 as best audio player software avabile for Windows.
Lightweight but still very powerful app with clean UI.
I have to agree. I never really liked Songbird all that much. It always choked when imported my media library.
For windows, I use:
mediamonkey – works great with large libraries
foobar2000 – anything local on my laptop
For linux, I use:
amarok 1.4.10 – large external library
banshee – local library..
Thanks for the tips! Just installed foobar2000, seems pretty slick and responsive.
I’ve been following SongBird with excitement since its very first pre-alpha announcement. Every version becomes better but their priorities are completely backwards IMHO. Every version includes new advanced features like integration hooks for web sites, social networking and so on, but they still lack a lot of the most fundamental basic features to make it a usable music player and manager.
For example, the only way to make it treat compilation albums (pretty common, aren’t they?) as albums and not a bunch of separate tracks is still through an ugly, time consuming, manual workaround that works poorly.
The library management names files like 1-*.mp3 + 10-*.mp3 for tracks 1 and 10, by design, with the only comment “Modern file managers can sort numerically, you don’t need to name it 01-foo.mp3”. Also it can’t have conditional names like (1-21-foo.mp3) for multi-disc albums. (This complaint is more with the attitude, not so much with the strange behaviour/missing feature)
Recently, they have started to include many major features as “Windows only”, treating us *nix and OSX users as second citizens.
It has become quite a bit more responsive for large libraries recently though, but their main focus is still on buzzword features like Web 2.0, social networking and pretty skins. Optimizing it for the most popular usage pattern as a player+manager for a local music collection seems to be at the bottom at their priority list.
I still have hopes for it, though. I’ll probably give it another try in 2011.
I see I’ve posted about Songbird a while ago, now, I see no change in regards to my previous issues. The biggest one is the performance, still not on the right track – this is quad core xeon on Linux. After going through the issues list I’ve compiled before, Songbird crashed, and after the restart I had no sound. No reinstalling, no rebooting, no process killing, no rm -rf, nothing helped.
Foobar2000 is my preferred choice on Windows since the very first versions, and Amarok does a decent job on Linux.