Songbird 1.0 review

After two years in development, Songbird - the open-source music manager - has finally seen an official 1.0 release. Superficially, it resembles iTunes, but it's actually built on Mozilla code, and in use it feels oddly like a browser, complete with tabs along the top of the window.

As you'd expect, all the basic features are offered for managing your music: you can arrange your audio files into static and smart playlists, and assign song ratings and album art to individual files or multiple selections. The controls are simple and intuitive.

Currently, though, there's no way to fetch album art from an online database, and CD ripping isn't supported at all. Video support is limited too.

But the beauty of the Mozilla code base is its extensibility, and Songbird already enjoys numerous extensions that add handy features.

One very useful plug-in is the MTP module, which adds support for most types of portable MP3 player - Creative, Archos, Cowon and Sandisk devices should all work out of the box. There's an Apple plug-in too, but for now it only works with older iPods: the developers are working on iPhone and iPod Touch support, but there's no guarantee of when it will arrive.

Other extensions add support for playing protected AAC and WMA files on authorised computers, integration with last.fm and band information based on the currently-playing song. Since the whole package is open source, there's no limit to the features that can be added. The modular approach should be efficient too, and the interface does feel very snappy and responsive; but its memory footprint is surprisingly large, eating up 100MB or more just to play a song.

To iTunes addicts, Songbird may seem like half a program: it works well with the music you already have, but offers no way to get more. As a basic media manager, though, it's attractively usable and far more flexible than Apple and Microsoft's offerings.

It urgently needs iPhone support, and we'd like to see RAM requirements reduced too. But since it's open source, freely extensible and unfettered by corporate interests, Songbird's future looks bright.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith