I'm just looking to poll the PA.c community in general on its opinions of SongBird(Portable). It seems that it's not winning fans as fast as I'm sure the developers of it would like. I see posts here for MediaMonkey, MusicBee and other iTunes alternatives, basically anything but SongBird! Everyone seems to be shying away from it, why is that? I have to confess I've only used it very briefly and I found it okay, comparable to iTunes although not nearly as polished.
So what is it that is turning everybody off about SongBird? I'm personally confused on why they make such a big deal about the fact that it's built on the same framework as Firefox... is that just a marketing ploy to make the app seem more awesome than it really is by clinging to the success of another app based off of the same framework? Is it right to question if this framework is even the right choice for a music management and media player application?
I hear a lot of complaints about the speed of Songbird, and I have to admit my library in songbird probably isn't extensive enough yet to give it major problems. The speed seems okay I suppose but I'm certainly not blown away by its responsiveness. Do people have some real-world experience of where SongBird's performance falls flat.
I'm not trying to knock the application, I'm just trying to get a sense of how well the application is met by the general audience and where that audience feels SongBird's shortcomings are. I suppose to expand a little further, I often find myself simply using a audio player or video player without the need for any kind of media management. I'm yet to be convinced of the benefits, although I'm willing to give it a try, but there's no point in my using something like SongBird if it's doomed to failure.
Your thoughts are most welcome!
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To be honest I only used Songbird for about a day. I've been using MediaMonkey for years and I think that it is much better suited for a large library and for those who are anal about their media library being perfect. I don't use an iPod, so I can't attest to how well Songbird works with that, in the same token, I've never had the need to use iTunes, although I hear the horror stories.
For me it's not a matter of being turned off to Songbird, it's more that MediaMonkey does everything I need it to and I have been using it for years. So until I see something in Songbird that MediaMonkey can't do as well, I'll continue to use MediaMonkey.
Having an Ipod myself, I cant use it because they dropped support for it a while ago. Once it dies and I have to look for something else, maybe Songbird comes into play again.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
I tried it and used it for a day or so too. I still have it installed, but haven't touched it recently.
It had some decent features but I generally found it buggy and unresponsive with a larger library. I don't use an ipod or anything like that either, so can't report on the interactivity there.
For:
I like mass tag editing. Helps organize the library quickly and easily, but as far as I know, most other library managers have that.
The possibility for add-ons. This is one of Firefox's strongest features, as long as you don't get too many going at once, then it becomes as clunky as IE.
Against:
Most of the add-ons seemed pointless. I browsed through practically every add-on except the feathers, and found most of them useless. Others may disagree, but there was almost nothing there that I felt would have made my Songbird experience any better.
One problem that annoyed the hell out of me was browsing to a somewhat large subsection of my library via genre or artist or whatever and then trying to select all or most tracks listed. More often than not it would select them all, but it would visually appear to have only selected the first ten or twelve tracks unless you reordered the list first.
I really didn't like the way it plays whatever next track is currently displayed. I usually listen to whole albums, not random tracks from my library, and whether you are playing a playlist or just an album that you have browsed from the library, as soon as you browse away from that view, the next track to play is the next track in your current view, so if you want to listen to one thing while browsing your library, you can't. I seem to remember seeing an add-on to remedy this, though.
Speed was an issue too, the interface was sometimes quite slow in catching up to what I was doing.
Overall:
Honestly, I might try out a couple of other media library apps eventually, but for now I might just use Songbird as a mass tag manager, and keep using CoolPlayer for playing my music.
I tried it out when I was looking for a new player a while back, to get off WinAmp.
I found one fundamental problem with it. If you import your whole library, and then import your pre-existing playlists into it, the playlists create duplicate copies of the track in them in the library.
I had, at the time, about 30,000 songs, and around 20 playlists, the largest of which was over 800 tracks. After importing them, I had as many as six copies of some songs in the library, all pointed at the same file on disk, and no way at all in the application (or with any addon) to merge them. All you could do was delete the dupes, which removed that track from whichever playlist had added that copy.
I looked at the bug tracked, and found that this was a known issue, but that none of the devs seemed to care about it - it had been known of for months, but was classed as a minor problem, not being worked on at that time.
This was back in the 1.0 days, but it still happens now.
My opinion, they're more interested in feature creep than bug fixes, and I'll stick with MediaMonkey, which I tried after it, but has done everything I need from a media library.
Thanks for all the opinions so far, this has been very informative, keep 'em coming!
I did use MediaMonkey a long time ago and I actually thought it was good. I certainly liked it better than iTunes (which in my experience also seems to have a habit of messing with your MP3 files and duplicating wherever it sees fit). I've only shied away from MediaMonkey because I'm trying hard to move to completely open source software but I suppose this is just a pipe dream.
I think the biggest stumbling block of all for me is that I've yet to be completely convinced that I even need a media manager at all, preferring to play my MP3s though XMPlay as and when I need to.
I took a closer look at the MusicBee website yesterday, and it looks promising if all the features work as described. I really should give it a try.
Anyway, like I said, I appreciate the feedback so far. Other users please feel free to share your thoughts, not just on SongBird but other media managers you might recommend in its place.
I tried it for a few hours at most. Over half of my library is audiobooks/podcasts. It annoyed me that those were lumped in with the rest of my music collection.
I personally do not use it. I am a minimalist at heart and love FooBar2000. FB2K does everything I need it to do from mass tagging, CD ripping, and even customizable media library sorting features. If I have guests over and music playing on the 'top, I throw XBMC up on the screen for people to navigate my media library and add songs to the queue.
Songbird is great for people that are used to iTunes but it seems like support for new iPods is nonexistent. When I fix people's computers, I install Songbird on there before bothering with iTunes, because they might like it. Few do, the rest go back to iTunes.
I find Songbird to be needlessly bulky and flashy, and worse yet unstable with large libraries. The interface and menus aren't as intuitive as I would like (then again, I use "complicated" software like VLC and FB2K as my media defaults).
I think if Songbird really wants to steal people away from drinking the apple Kool-Aid from the iT*t, they need to focus on stability with large databases and implement native support for DAP devices (iPods, Zunes, etc), specifically newer iPod devices. Though, I doubt newer iPod support is possible with Apple's restrictive licensing and sue-you mentality when it comes to competitive development.
Limits are for people with no imagination.
and use it a lot... but I can live without it so...
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
Honestly I can't see why anybody would want to use SongBird. I like that it's based off the Firefox engine, but I have to agree nearly all of it's addons are useless. Plus I don't like how it sorts your music. When I listen to music I generally listen by Artist or by Album, not by random selection of my entire collection. Plus why would I want a music that looks like a glorified spreadsheet? Personally I mutch prefer an interface like that of WMP or Zune 4.
Release Team Member
Pros: I am familiar with iTunes interface, so this is a big plus. Also, built-in Last.fm scrobbler.
Cons: No AAC/Apple Lossless ripping, no iPod support, no Podcast support (at least, nothing that I can find)
I'm looking for a portable iTunes alternative, and Songbird is halfway there.
SWAG
It has limited podcast support built in. It can be improved with this hack:
http://www.notablygood.com/Songbird.aspx
Apple has made iPod support difficult to impossible by changing the way the iPods work with each generation and update to purposely break 3rd party software. I've moved away from iPods for that very reason. I actually still have one, but I hacked Rythmnbox onto it.
AAC support isn't terribly useful outside of iPods. Songbird supports open codecs like OGG and FLAC (which is lossless).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Right, AAC doesn't matter too much outside of iPods, but I happen to have an iPod.
The main problem is that I want to take my iTunes library with me. This works fine with Songbird except that podcasts are lumped in with songs and resubscribing would probably do something goofy.
I've been bummed about Apple's attitude with 3rd party software. They did the same thing when Realplayer tried adding support. I'd like an alternative music player, but Zune was really disappointing.
Might have to try Rhythmbox though.
SWAG
Poti are Songbird's Biggest Flaw!!!!!.
POTI are frauds and Songbird is bloatware!!!!. and as I have seen so many times Songbird is cool for a while but users soon get sick of it corrupting their music, so they go back to the familiar. and honestly a "itunes alternative" that is not even any good on itunes own os? how lame!!!!!
http://alternativeto.net/software/songbird/comments
Songbird will never be a decent portable app ever!! it's not even very good as a normal app!. I consider it an insult to this community!!!
Please try to be tolerant with me,I would like to be able to contribute to communities like this one, I just don't have the talent or knowledge yet. So if you help me now, I may be able to help others later!
Yes I'm a Mac & Linux Fan!
personally I respect your opinion but I don't agree with you, I've been running songbird on my own linux box (custom linux all compiled from source and not a "name brand" linux), my windows 7 pc and I consider it a pretty good music app, now considering the video playback features of songbird does suck but I can understand that they can't redistribute the codecs to play avi (xvid/divx encoded files) etc due to licensing/legal issues, but in my opinion that's no reason to go bashing the whole thing at all.
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
If you buy an iPod, you're essentially buying it with the understanding that you have to use Apple's iTunes software and you have no alternatives. Same with an iPhone, iPad, etc. It's the way Apple operates. If you want some say in how your device operates or what software it works with, you have to buy something from another company.
The second most popular MP3 players are Sandisk Sansa's, which surprises most people. These are switchable between music protocol and disk protocol. In disk protocol, it's just a drive that shows up and folders you can drop music into. Songbird can do that with one of the FolderSync extensions. Creative's MP3 players will do the same and are similarly cheaper size for size vs iPods.
A couple of my friends just dropped their iPhones for Android phones and are now using those as their music players. They're 16gb built-in and work with a few different things for managing your music.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Right. I got a Droid 2 recently, but I'm waiting for Meridian to be updated before I consider buying a huge memory card and switching over.
SWAG
I had a huge long post prepared but I think I might save it for my website, sufficed to say here the conclusion so far is:
It's unfortunate, it has always been an app that promised much...
For what it does, it's only a little more bloated than iTunes. If you'd like something lighter weight, try something like foobar2000.
It handles my 43.6GB music library fine.
Who cares if many of the add-ons are useless? Many of them for Firefox are, too. But lots of people like last.fm integration, folder synchronization, media flow (similar to cover flow), queue lists, themes, quicktime, windows media, Shoutcast, etc.
And iPod requires iTunes. You don't like it? Buy a more open music player.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I disagree. I use SharePod and have never needed iTunes since.
Sharepod works with iPods that support disk mode*
*disk mode not supported by iPod Touch (1st gen, 2nd gen, 3rd gen) or iPhone (2G, 3G, 3GS, 4). Disk mode may be removed by forthcoming firmware updates to iPod Classic/Video at Apple's discretion without notification according to their EULA. Forthcoming iPods may not support disk mode.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I honestly love Songbird.
It does absolutely everything I need and functionality can be extended with Add-ons. You can't expect Songbird to be compatible with iPod's, or have Songbird prompt you on a new Apple firmware upgrade. It was never built or designed for that.
I've only noticed Songbird freezing when running from a USB. It runs perfectly locally.
I use the Songbird Portable on my USB external hard drive, and I don't have any issues with the performance, save the long time it takes to load the library (38 GB library takes about 1 minute to load).
The main issue is the playback method. My original method of playback has been to create an on-the-fly playlist with the songs that I want, then play that playlist. Songbird does not operate like that. You select the type of music / album / artist that you want to play, and then it plays the list that was sorted. That took me some time to get used to.
Otherwise the program works well. The Party Ruffle extension allows for random selection of music either from the library or a smart playlist, so it works well for placing music in a queue. Songbird also recognizes and configures my old Creative Labs MuVo 256MB MP3 player without issues.
I enjoy this program, and while the video portions are not of any real use as of yet, it is very good as an MP3 player with library manager.
The only things in life we regret are the risks we didn't take.
unfortunately Songbird will never fly, it is a sad fact that such a great concept could go the way songbird seems to be going. I believe Songbird had a great chance to be one of, if not the best all in one media player for linux and a challenger to iTunes on OS X and from what I have been told media monkey and winamp are both good on Windows I'm not sure as I use AIMP2 portable and it has served us well. Device support is woeful I have a iMac 24" and we couldn't connect/sync anything to it at all!(unless itunes was open) Songbird has support for stupid, uncommon, and unpopular devices, what little it does have is reasonable, addons are always breaking on update and never seem to get worked on{the Songbirds own ipod addon is the best proof of that fact}.there was a feature that would tell you what was on in your area, that was great and all if you lived in Bloody Sydney or Melbourne but I live in a rural town in South Australia there is no info for where I live so what is the point of this feature?!. Also and this part is only my point of view, other will differ... the songbird community needs to make songbird a multi-mediaplayer not a web browser/mediaplayer. Songbird also seem to have a lot of trouble with codecs, how do other media players supply the codecs for free maybe a licence change is in order.
***on a personal note I don't trust the developers POTI. I believe that they only have one aim and that is to scam people! having said all of this please understand I know that some peoples opinions will be different to mine and I respect that and their views on this subject***
Please try to be tolerant with me,I would like to be able to contribute to communities like this one, I just don't have the talent or knowledge yet. So if you help me now, I may be able to help others later!
Yes I'm a Mac & Linux Fan!