Songbird "User Preview" First Look
By Alexander Grundner |
February 8th, 2006
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After reading BoingBoing’s interview with Rob Lord, one of the lead developers of Songbird, a new freeware music application based on cross-platform technologies used in both Firefox and Thunderbird, I thought I give the “User Preview” release a try. Below are my initial findings.
Pros
- Attractive users interface – everything is logically placed and fairly uncluttered
- Songbird was able to add my library of music almost seamlessly. When first running the application, Songbird asks which folder your music is kept in and then quickly inventories its contents (you can also have it “Watch” the folder for new additions). Unfortunately, though, when you actually click on the “Library” menu item for the first time, Songbird is extremely sluggish in adding/displaying Artist/Album titles, but after that it comes right up.
- Songbird offers a nice selection of pre-configured music store selections, podcast directories, internet radio directories, the ability to search your favorite search engines, add bookmarks, and (possibly) even add tracks to your networked music devices. Note that most of the directories and stores shown in the menu are really only links to web pages that open within the application. Basically, it’s no different than navigating to these same pages in your regular web browser.
- Nice search extension integration similar to Firefox, which allows you to quickly select from several directories or search engines from a drop down list in the search bar.
- Super convenient forward and back navigation of the content shown in the main window.
- Lyric search if you add the right search engine
Cons
- There’s a quirk with the application when fully expanded – it disables access to your auto-hide taskbar in XP.
- Limited support of network devices – currently it looks like you can only add tracks to a SlimDevices Squeezebox player (I could be wrong since I don’t own a Squeezebox to test it out).
- Burn to CD and Copy to device is disabled
- Only one alternative skin – dark red version of the original
- No graphic equalizer?!
- No cover art?!
- No song browsing by Genre
- Unintuitive/difficult internet radio station bookmarking
- You can’t drag the Mini Player around the screen
Possible future video support?
I tested to see if would allow me to open a video file located on my hard drive, since it would be nice to use this app as a multi-purpose media player, but fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you want to look at it) it only allowed me to hear audio when attempting to play AVI and MOV files. I know they’re focusing on music exclusively, but video integration would definitely be a nice addition.
Conclusion
Download and take Songbird for a spin! It’s not as refined as many would hope (and at this point, definitely not an “iTunes Killer” as many are labeling it), but it’s a great start on a project that could eventually be as popular as Firefox. Reason being, it supports various third party services, it’s designed to be extensible, and will eventually be ported to Mac and Linux once the Windows version gets all the bugs worked out.
Melloware – 18 hours 49 minutes ago