If, like me, you despise iTunes with a passion, this could be the player for you. It’s called Songbird, and it’s an open source alternative to the big, bloated media players that dominate the market. Powered by Mozilla, it’s could soon be the Firefox of media software.
It works with iPods and your existing iTunes library, and integrates with YouTube, ShoutCast, Last.fm and other media-related apps. It links to concert tickets for artists in your library, supports FairPlay tracks, works on Windows or Macs and even has an integrated web browser.
All sorts of extra features are in beta, as the Songbird website details, and you can also download add-ons in the same way as you currently do with Firefox - so the possibilities for expansion are immense.
Version 1.0.0 was officially launched yesterday, and I’ve downloaded it to see how it puts up with my terrible music taste, so look out for a full review soon.
UPDATE: Read the full review of songbird 1.0 here.
Tags: iTunes, media player, music, songbird
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December 3rd, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Always nice to get pointers like this, pity there’s a mistake in the link to this blog… hhttp is not a well known prefix…
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:01 pm
The lyrics add-in is very impressive, seems to do really well at providing for my depressive Belgian finest!
The Last.FM integration is very impressive, it’s provided the history of pretty much every artist in my library within seconds of playing a track by said artist
146MB RAM usage is a lot though…
December 4th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Interesting you say it’s an alternative to bloated apps. I tried this a few weeks back, and it ate more memory than Itunes and WMplayer (separately, obviously). It also had a nasty memory leak that meant it grabbed more memory at the rate of about 1MB/2mins. Is that all sorted in V1.00?
December 4th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Replying to my own post - how sad. Anyway, Songbird V1.00 displaying library: 100MB; WMplayer v11 displaying library: 20MB. Still, it looks like the memory leak is fixed. So, contrary to the author’s opinion - bloated as hell.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Fair point, as I said in the post, I’d only just downloaded it so hadn’t tested any of that. We’ll be sure to look closely at memory footprints in the review.
It is worth bearing in mind that unlike WMP and itunes, Songbird is also a web browser, so you could feasibly replace both your media player *and* browser with this one app.
December 4th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
I thought WMP had an internet explorer frame built into one of the functions. Rubbish, and I’d never use it as a browser, but sill (I believe a functional browser. Please, someone, prove me wrong.