Apple Thoughts: Songbird 1.0: Not Yet an iTunes Replacement

Product Category: Desktop Media Player
Developer: Pioneers of the Inevitable
Where to Download: Songbird Home Page
Price: Free
System Requirements: Intel Mac, at least 512Mb of Memory
Specifications: Requires about 120 Megabytes for install.

Pros:

• Has a plug-in architecture;
• It's free and open source.

Cons:

• Doesn't support iPhone/iPod Touch syncing;
• Couldn't get it to sync with my first generation shuffle.

Summary:
Songbird 1.0 is an open source, cross-platform media player built from the Firefox Web Browser. Like Firefox, Songbird supports extensions and it's appearance can be changed using skins called "feathers."

Initial Impressions

Figure 1: Importing songs from iTunes was easy.

After installing Songbird, I imported my iTunes library. This was an easy process and took about an hour. It also imported my iTunes playlists. Songbird doesn't support playlist folders, so it imported my playlist folders as playlists containing all the songs in that folder. This seemed unmanageable to me, as some of my playlist folders contain dozens of albums making for very long playlists.

As expected, Songbird was able to play all of my media. It can even play music protected by Apple's Fair Play DRM from the iTunes store. I didn't notice a difference in sound quality between Songbird and iTunes. Songbird will also play formats not supported by iTunes, including ogg files.

The Power of Customization

Figure 2: Songbird with the LyricMaster and Music Recommendations extensions.

One place where Songbird shines is its plug-in architecture. Like Firefox, songbird allows you to add extensions. I installed LyricMaster, a Music Recommendations, and Concerts. LyricMaster finds lyrics for the currently playing song and adds them to the music file's metadata so you can retrieve them later. This didn't work for songs purchased from the iTunes store. The lyrics would show up, but I couldn't save the metadata for those files.

The Concert plug-in opens a new tab showing upcoming concerts in a city of your choosing. While this is useful, it'd be a lot more useful if I could restrict that list to artists in my library. Music Recommendations plug-in works a lot like Genius in iTunes, though it also provides information about the artist currently playing.