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Coming soon: Songbird 0.4

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 @ 5:35 am

The Songbird team is working hard to push out a 0.4 release by the end of the year. This Mozilla-based media player still has long way to go before it'll be ready for prime time. But incremental improvements from one developer prerelease to the next keep me excited about the possibilities. Changes for 0.4 include the concept of display panes: "standard integration points to attach Songbird add-ons to." Songbird's XUL-based rendering engine allows plugin authors to completely rewire the application interface, but display panes simplify that process by dividing UI real estate into predefined zones. Plugin authors will still be able to build their own layouts, but in most cases they'll probably prefer to wire up the standard display panes; that's just usability 101.

When I first posted about Songbird a couple of months ago, I hoped that it would eventually become the player of choice for users with very large (100gb+) media collections - users like me. Trolling Bugzilla, I can see the database engineers are hard at work figuring out how to optimize performance for power users as well as typical users. One possible approach: tuning the SQLite search algorithms based on user profile and library size. After years of struggling with iTunes's terrible scalability problem, I'm eager for an alternative. Songbird's search functionality is still extremely slow compared to other, more mature applications. But I'm buoyed by the knowledge that Songbird's developer community includes folks who aren't interested exclusively in casual users with a few hundred (ore even a few thousand) tracks.

After my original post, commentators suggested I give Amarok and foobar2000 a shot. But given that the former is a Linux/Unix project and the latter is Windows-only, I remain unconvinced. Songbird may not emerge from the demoware stage for a while, but the possibility of an open-source, cross-platform media player still gets me excited.

In addition to scalability, I was looking forward to better tools for the construction of mixtape-style playlists. Voila, the Songbird Blogs bring news of the Now Playing add-on, which allows you to construct a playlist in the right sidebar display pane while keeping your library visible. Compared to the iTunes interface, in which it's impossible to view both a playlist and your media library at the same time, this is an awesome feature.

I've been chatting with Songbird's Stephen Lau about the project and hope to publish an interview with him to coincide with the 0.4 release. Watch this space.

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Comments: 2 so far

  1. I’m excited about Songbird as well. One flaw of linux is it’s lack of a robust media player. I use rhythmbox for all my music libraries, but Totem for videos. I hope that this will a) Use gstreamer (on Ubuntu) and b) integrate well with my ipod. I’m going to install it when I get home and give it a run.

    Comment by T.J., Tuesday, December 18, 2007 @ 9:25 am

  2. T.J.: Yup - Songbird, on Linux, uses GStreamer for all its media playback. It also supports syncing with the iPod (the only caveat is you have to have Songbird already open, and then plug in the iPod - but that’s pretty minor).

    Comment by stevel, Wednesday, December 19, 2007 @ 2:05 pm

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