I’ve never used or seen the Songbird player until today. Which is why this review may be useful for the uninitiated — I’m not familiar with any of the standard Songbird jargon, assumptions, tricks & tips etc.
Pic: Just a cutout from the playlist area…
What: A media player application.
Why: Simple & Elegant. Open source. Usability High. It’s been likened to a cross between FireFox and VLC media player. If you subscribe to the FireFox philosophy, this is for you.
Where: Here.
How: Just install and start clicking around. You won’t need a tutorial.
Good points
Easy-to-use easy to navigate playlist browser. You just start by giving it the path to your music directory, and from there on you can just browse by artist, album or song title on the same little window — no complicated tree structures. Search works beautifully and it’s really fast.
(I’m told Winamp too has some of these things, but I haven’t updated my Winamp for a long time now)
User interface. Minimalist; functional; monochrome; simple, smooth, line-art graphics. My kind of interface. Skins are called ‘feathers’ (found under file menu). The default feathers (Rubberducky and Dove) can be improved upon, but there will no doubt be new feathers coming soon. Alternate row shading on lists make them easy to read.
Minimode: Click the fourth button next to the minimize button on the title bar and you’ll go into the mini mode. Songbird becomes an unobtrusive little sliver of an app which you can keep on the side. A simple “Jump To” dialog box allows you to browse or search songs without going back to normal mode.
Browsing and playing off the Web: One of the biggest things about Songbird, but unfortunately I’m just not into playing things off the web. My link speed and patience don’t correspond. Just check the website or the Wikipedia page if you want to know about that…
Compatibility: It can play a wide variety of formats (including rather obscure formats) and can run on Windows 2000/XP, Mac and Linux.
Bad points
Memory usage. At startup, Songbird took a whopping 31MB as opposed to Media Player’s modest 7MB on my PC. Since it seems to have a lot of code in common with a previous version of FireFox, it probably has the memory leaks in common too. But it’s still version 0.2 — expect version 1.0 to be much better.
No equalizer. Yet. It’s still version 0.2, a developer preview. Whatever it doesn’t have now, you can probably expect in the future, including visualizations (I was never a fan of those), CD-to-library copying etc.
Bugs. There are a few teensy-weensy bugs, but nothing that’ll put a serious damper on your experience. Pretty decent for a 0.2.
Conclusion
Good to try out if: (a) you’re into the idea of an ‘alternative’ player, or (b) you’re not happy with any of the players you currently have or (c) you’ve never heard of anything except Windows Media Player. If you try it and find it a bit feature-bare, just you wait for 1.0. But don’t expect miracles with memory consumption…
2 Comments
Thanks. I’ve been using VU Player all this while but I’ve been using for a player that has a good media library function and this seems a good bet. The memory usage is a huge turn off though.
If it’s memory footprint gets too big after a few hours, just restart the player…
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[...] I’ve discovered Songbird — an open source FireFox-like media player. See the review at Colombo Critic. [...]
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