wax&wires

Songbird Challenges iTunes for Music Player Dominance

So I’ve been playing with the new firefox-based music player Songbird for a bit of time now, and must say it’s even more awesome than I expected.

In reading the features and reviews, most of the additions seemed “nice”, but not anything that was going to blow me away or sway me from iTunes. After installing and actually using it though, it’s functionally far superior. The scarier part is, since it’s open source, it’s guaranteed to gain even more features and functionality; and all with a high level of user customization.

The install was easy enough, and it imported my entire iTunes library without a hiccup. You can have it search your whole computer for files, or simply make it only import the things you would access within iTunes anyway, which is what I elected. It imported very fast too. I’ve got about 40 GB of music, and it took less than 5 minutes for Songbird to index all of the files and get me up and running.

The big one up with Songbird is it’s use of Add-ons. It comes with a few that you can select to install off the bat, like iPod support, quicktime playback, last.fm etc. Where it really shines is in it’s browser-like functionality. The concert add-on shows you concert tickets in your area for any of the artists that are in your library. As more and more people get into it, you’re guaranteed to see an influx of new add-ons as well.

I still wasn’t totally sold until I popped it open and hit play. As soon as I selected an artist, the MashTape feature pulled up the last.fm bio of the artist including full discography, photos, and even YouTube videos within the bottom panel of Songbird. All of those features were viewable within Songbird, eliminating the need to open and search through a 3rd party browser.

Then there’s the hype machine, which gives you news from thousands of music blogs to keep you up-to-date on all the happenings in the music world. The page actually opens up in a new tab, just as if it were an internet browser. So your player view (the one that looks like iTunes and handles all of your music playback) stays untouched, while a new tab opens with the Hype Machine ready to go. Just like firefox, it’s a fully functioning browser should you want to head out to do some web surfing. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all that it can do, so don’t feel like you need to learn it all, just use what you want to use and you’ll be happy.

The next bonus within the Hype Machine is music blog streaming. The top panel of the window shows you the actual blog you’ve navigated to within the Hype Machine. The bottom panel then extracts all music files from the blog for full music streaming of all the mp3s on the given blog while you browse around. To the right of the songs you’ll see an option to read the blog post containing the song, as well as purchase the full song from iTunes, AmazonMP3 or eMusic; your choice. 

But what about your iPhone? While Songbird can’t sync with your iPhone yet, some applications are now being released that increase the role the iPhone can play within Songbird. 779Media just released an iPhone application that allows you to control Songbird from your iPhone or iPod Touch. This works essentially like the iTunes-based remote app, but it doesn’t give you a library listing for queuing playlists or albums, which makes it serve more as a basic transport controller for Songbird. So while the application’s iPhone performance leaves much to be desired, if developers are as diligent with developing iPhone support as they were with the architecture of the program as a whole, there’s a lot of promise for coming improvements.

In addition to iPhone woes, several users have reported that Songbird has trouble playing protected content downloaded from iTunes. I didn’t have any problem playing any of my downloaded m4p files, so you’ll have to try it for yourself to see if it flies on your machine.

The only other real complaint I had was the lack of a way to minimize the applciation to have a smaller footprint on my desktop. I know that’s kind of a lame complaint, but I’m sure it’s an easy fix for them to incorporate. For all I know, I just missed that button somewhere on the app too. UPDATE: THERE IS A WAY TO CREATE A “MINI VIEW” BY GOING TO “VIEW” IN THE MENU BAR, AND THEN SELECTING “MINI PLAYER”. STILL, A KEY COMMAND OR BUTTON FROM THE MAIN PLAYER OUGHT TO BE IMPLEMENTED.

One of the funny things through all of this: I had begun using Pandora almost exclusively, just to get some new and fresh music to my ears. I was so enamored with Songbird’s functionality and add-ons that I found myself returning to music I hadn’t listened to in years just to read the bios, see pics and videos, and read what people were writing in the Hype Machine, all within Songbird. It definitely breathed new life into my music library.

With Songbird’s open source format, it’s guaranteed to stay fresh as long as the community is interested in it. If iTunes were to gain all of the features of Songbird, it would definitely warrant a release of iTunes 9. Seeing as how iTunes 8 just came out a few months back, it’s not likely that any developmental version of iTunes is that far along yet. Apple can keep it’s genius sidebar, Songbird gets my vote.

Check it out for yourself here, it’s free after all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 12:16 am. It is filed under wires and tagged with itunes, music player, songbird. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.