Songbird 0.1 Web player

[tdinc]

released yesterday...Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

http://www.songbirdnest.com/


My 2 cents:

I was excited when this project was first announced a few months ago. it has similar look to itunes. when you load the program it feels a bit clunky, the response time seems off when trying to sort though the options. the pre-loaded bookmarks can't be deleted ( I have not found a way, yet) possible option in a future release. because this is a "Concept release" I was expecting bugs. extension plug-ins (ala, firefox) will be sure to become available as the project matures. all in all a worthy effort...

2.5/5 stars

 

[Terrahertz]

Hmm this seems pretty cool. Once it gets rolling Im sure it will garner attention and good support.

 

[LordOfLA]

point it at an apache directory listing of mp3's or other compatible audio files

 

[NetRyder]

I wasn't really impressed in any way either. It's too early to form opinions right now anyway.
All I can say is, it's going to take a long time before this can catch up and become as polished and mature as something like iTunes or WMP.

 

[sean.ferguson]

Well, it looks like it could just be another Real Player ("clunky"), but I like it. It does run hideously here even with the 1GB of Dual Channel RAM so the slowness of it can safely be put down to the coding which hopefully can be worked out.

Looks nice though, it plays the streams seamlessly which is the most important factor of course. 3/5 for me for now.

(p.s. this was on win32, might try it on OSX which also has 1GB of RAM just for comparison)

 

[rotjong]

I like the looks of it but I gave up and uninstalled it. It choked on my music collection when I tried to load everything. I'll check it out once it's gotten further along in development.

rotjong

 

[Grandmaster]

Played around with it the other day.

Yesterday, Songbird was unleashed. According to the Pioneers of the Inevitable (seriously, that’s the developers call themselves), Songbird is an open source program that aims to change the way we think of “music services“, and even comes with a bird that seems to switch between farting and wetting itself as a mascot. How exciting.

As you might have guessed by now, Songbird attempts to integrate features from both Firefox and iTunes into one application.

Features

To be honest, right now it’s a pretty barebones program. It’s like Firefox with an elaborate iTunes extension with a media browser, and the ability to automatically scan sites for different types of audio such as mp3 files, podcasts, and radio streams.

I found the web browsing to be quite slow compared to Firefox, although I think that has to do with Songbird trying to scan each page for audio. Well the scanning should be faster. And how can they use Firefox as the platform to build upon and not even include tabs?!

Since it’s foundation is Firefox, it has support for extensions, although none of the work anymore. Hopefully we’ll see some really awesome extensions in the future.

I’d also like to say that while it does eat up to 75MB of RAM, Firefox and iTunes combined eat up around the same amount, so if you think of it that way it’s not that much.

User Interface and Eye Candy

The user interface could be streamlined to make it a bit less cluttered, but overall I found it easy to use. There is a list of “services” in a left side pane, which is basically a bunch of pre-saved bookmarks to various music related websites. At the top you’ll find the built in audio player so you have easy access to player controls while you surf.

Songbird comes with two skins, black and red. They aren’t really that great, and if a program doesn’t look great - I don’t feel like using it much. I think it’s because generally I do not like dark skins. The developers could definitely improve this part of the program by including a brighter and cleaner skin.

Great Potential

Ultimately, the Songbird isn’t much at the moment. However, there’s a reason the current version is called the “Songbird User Preview”. I still recommend checking it out.

rotjong: I made it load up all my music and I have around 10GB of it...didn't have any problems. I guess you got unlucky.

 

[rotjong]

rotjong: I made it load up all my music and I have around 10GB of it...didn't have any problems. I guess you got unlucky.

I was trying to load my HD that I turned into a jukebox. I got tired of messing around with my CDs and my CD player so I ripped them to my HD.

My collection is 17,753 MP3s @ 96.9 GB. Now, of course, this is a fairly large amount of files but I've never had problems with foobar2000, WinAmp, iTunes or pretty much any other program I've used. But, then again this program is still very new and needs more development.

I think I'm going to install it again and point it to a really small portion of my MP3s to check it out more.

Update:

In terms of aesthetics I have issues with resizing the GUI. If I maximize the program it takes my entire screen and I even lose the taskbar. If I want to make it smaller it doesn't actually fit in the available space and I have to mess around to make the GUI fit in the available desktop space. I have a 2 double height taskbar with StatBar above that with the resolution at 1024 x 768.

rotjong

 

[Grandmaster]

I was trying to load my HD that I turned into a jukebox. I got tired of messing around with my CDs and my CD player so I ripped them to my HD.

My collection is 17,753 MP3s @ 96.9 GB. Now, of course, this is a fairly large amount of files but I've never had problems with foobar2000, WinAmp, iTunes or pretty much any other program I've used. But, then again this program is still very new and needs more development.

I think I'm going to install it again and point it to a really small portion of my MP3s to check it out more.

rotjong

Ah, that makes much more sense. Damn, and I thought I had a lot of music

 

[rotjong]

Ah, that makes much more sense. Damn, and I thought I had a lot of music

LOL. Well, the speakers are better on my computer than my stereo and I actually saved space by getting rid of the standalone CD player and stereo. Now I just use my computer. No more switching CDs and random play can be quite interesting :crosseyed:

rotjong