Comments on: Songbird 0.3: Why aren’t Ajax folks more geeked about “the Firefox of media players”?

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:09:26 +0000

I remember seeing Songbird when it was in one of it’s first beta stages. I think it didn’t even have tabbed browsing then. It seemed like a great idea but the lack of tabs made me uninstall it. So when I saw RC 1 I redownloaded it. But it won’t play music on my system for reasons unknown to me. Talk about one MAJOR key feature missing.

By: Brett

Brett — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:25:27 +0000

Spend some time with Amarok and you’ll completely forget about Songbird.

By: Elijah

Elijah — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:05:35 +0000

XUL Is a memory hog, and javascript is not the quickest thing in the world. On the other hand, songbird is a great way to find new music.

By: Rico

Rico — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:30:46 +0000

I’ve been using Songbird for several months now, and I adore it. For the comment above about how much of the screen is functionally used and not banner ads, the web portion is only there when you’re accessing it. Otherwise, it’s a similar screen setup as itunes, with the song listings below in the main window along with search classes (artist, song, etc.) The web portion is nice if, like me, you go to music blogs like fluxblog. That i can go to website and have my browser automatically que up all the songs on the page, listing their relevant track data, and putting it in a sortable, browsable list is awesome. I can read about the bands while listening to their tunes, and without having to download the song, import it into my media player, find it, then play it. It’s way easier and convenient. I’ve had no problems with speed with my “meager” 60 gig collection.

For stability, it’s crashed a handful of times since i started using it, and it’s still just a .3 release. I have problems with itunes as much as that. To each their own, I spose. I just wanted to comment that some users are happy with the application. ^_^

By: Paco

Paco — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 21:31:16 +0000

Know why it sucks?
It's in very unstable beta for more then a year now. New features are added without taking notice at bugs that make Songbird unusable. The main thing about a music player is playing music. The rest is bonus. No more fancy features should be added untill the stuff works.

It's also very slow. My experience was 3-4 times slower then amarok with a music collection of 100GB.

I don't get the point about spending so much time on marketing songbird while it still sucks

By: Songbirdnest.com

Songbirdnest.com — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:31:04 +0000

People are talking…

People are talking, talking ’bout people
I hear them whisper, you won’t believe it
– Bonnie Raitt
To follow up on Rob’s post from a few days ago, 0.3 has been out crossing the tubes of the Internet. As people noted, 0.3 is quite a huge step up

By: Paul Houle

Paul Houle — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:53:29 +0000

Want to know why I don’t care?

Take a close look at the screenshot. Less than 10% of the screen area is devoted to functionality I care about, like the play button and the volume control. I don’t need banner ads, web browsing, useless online stores.

Perhaps it’s better than iTunes, but that’s not hard to do. Maybe it has a “stop” button instead of a “pause” button. Trying to get iTunes to stop playing music reminds me of an old movie, Colossus: The Forbin Project, about an evil supercomputer that couldn’t be turned off without blowing up the world. Sometimes it seems the best way to stop iTunes is to pull the plug out of the wall socket.

If you want to make a music player that I’ll take seriously, try following in the footsteps of foobar2000, VLC and other programs that play music, period.

By: mig

mig — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:42:06 +0000

Yay!

When do we get to see a cool sample Songbird-aware website?

mig