Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source
Songbird 1.0 released
by Brad Linder Dec 2nd 2008 at 2:14PM
The cross-platform music player comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, and can handle playback of most music formats. Like most Mozilla-based software, Songbird supports plugins, including a QuickTime Playback plugin that adds the ability to play music purchased from the iTunes store. There's also a plugin that allows you to sync your music with portable media players including an iPod.
Songbird is much more than a music player. It's also an online music browser. You can visit web sites using the built in browser and automatically stream or download MP3 music from those pages. And thanks to the Last.fm integration, you can get additional information about songs and artists you're playing, or stream related songs from Last.fm.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bakk said 3:51PM on 12-02-2008
Has anyone used this to keep a WinMo 6.1 phone in sync?? How does it work? Specifically the Touch Diamond?
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faustuscm said 3:58PM on 12-02-2008
Read somewhere it even works with iPhone. Thinking of checking it out tonight.
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Robert H said 4:37PM on 12-02-2008
How do you stream related songs from Last.fm?
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aanidaani said 7:22PM on 12-02-2008
Songbird can actually play songs downloaded from iTunes, as long as you have Quicktime installed.
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John said 10:01PM on 12-02-2008
Anyone know if it's working with Airport Express yet?
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Mike said 7:42AM on 12-03-2008
Songbird could be such a great music manager, too bad it overwrites my genre tags with numbers and randomly chops up song title tags. If they sorted that out i'd kick MM to the curb.
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Fred Thompson said 7:43AM on 12-03-2008
Why would someone use this instead of SubSonic?
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kevinpalooza said 7:43AM on 12-03-2008
The lack of integrated podcast functionality (especially without a built-in directory like iTunes has) plus the lack of being able to mark certain music files to "Remember Playback Position" like you can do with iTunes and Zoom Player, makes me reluctantly stick with iTunes even though it's bloated and piggybacks more bloat that I don't want (Bonjour, Quicktime)
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Mike said 3:28PM on 12-03-2008
I used to use zoom player for the past year or so. Then when I realized that they are most likely never going to release a free version of their newest version, I switched to Media Player Classic with some plugins and it does everything that Zoom Player did. And if you want the codec downloader/autoconfigure app, just copy it from the zoom player install folder...it's a standalone .exe :)
I like songbird alot, but I won't be using it as my main app until some of these large bugs are fixed.
Mike said 4:10PM on 12-03-2008
Also, you should really consider using Quicktime Alternative with the iTunes patch....cuts out alot of the bloat (but not all of it).
Kevinpalooza said 6:17PM on 12-03-2008
Thanks Mike. Yeah I second the Quicktime Alternative suggestion, but unfortunately you have to do a command-line edit to iTunes when you install in order to remove Quicktime. If you uninstall Quicktime post-install, then iTunes will say it can't work (even with QA installed) or something like that. At least that was the case a few months ago when I last tried. Couple that with the pretty frequent iTunes updates and the need to download a whole new installer each time..and it gets to be a hassle.
Superevil said 11:59AM on 12-03-2008
ok, this is the second chance I'm giving Songbird and it's the last. Damn thing messes up my tags, does not change the album art on song change and I really hate the fact that it doesn't jump to the next track when it changes. how hard can that be? I'm going back to Exaile.
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Jacco said 12:06PM on 12-03-2008
Yeah, the first thing it really does with me is crash when I try to play something. I like the player, but this is really crap.
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neozound said 7:27AM on 12-04-2008
Superevil, all those things work on my Songbird. What distro are you using?
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Joao Almeida said 8:30PM on 12-04-2008
Podcast support for IPod still is pretty bad: it's not there.
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Chrisscrewball said 11:07PM on 12-08-2008
I just downloaded 1.0 two days ago. After about a fifteen minute import of my ~25000 song itunes library it was ready to go. Looks a lot like itunes and was quite an easy transition. The first day it crashed twice but has been in continual usage since and has not had one problem yet. The lyrics add-on is ILL! Also, the ability to find out if any concerts are coming up is extremely useful. I tried a couple other add-ons which worked quite nicely. I did notice that it consumes a good deal more memory than itunes used to but the extra functionality more than makes up for it. Hey, it only gets better from here.
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Aelon Rhiadra said 9:47AM on 12-10-2008
Loved the last Songbird client but with my laptop, i need graphics equalisation to get a good Bass Response. Because of this, it was, quite frankly, useless to me. Does 1.0 have a graphics equaliser yet?
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