Well today, I tried out
Mozilla Songbird, Mozilla’s attempt to take on
Apple’s iTunes,
Windows Media Player and
Realplayer (
Does anyone use that anymore?). Regardless, they’ve done an expectedly good job. After
FireFox, you don’t doubt that anything the Mozilla team pulls out is going to be good. It will be. It’s a fact.
To start with, installing Songbird is easy. It asks you where the folder with all your music files is and scans it and it’s subdirectories for anything it can import. Excellent. Just like how FireFox imports all your bookmarks… as you expect it to.
What’s even better is that during installing, it presents you with a list of plug-ins that you would like, or that you will need to play your music, such as the Quicktime plug-in. They install quickly and it’s a breeze. So by the time you’ve actually gotten into the Songbird application, everything is there and ready to go (this took no more than a minute or two for me, thanks to my speedy computer).
However, this is where you run into irritating little problems. For instance, the first thing I found was that pressing the “Play” key (F8) on my keyboard did nothing, and I couldn’t set said key to do anything in the application preferences, as far as I could see. Not a big deal. No doubt an add-on will solve that. Call me fussy, but I don’t want to download an add-on. I want it out of the box.
And naturally, without even having support for the keys on my keyboard, trying my Apple Remote would have just been another disappointment. So I didn’t try. But whether or not it does work with Songbird isn’t even debatable. Because it will. No doubt one of the first add-ons will be an Apple Remote add-on. So there’s no worries there.
It’s easy to slam a product, though. Very easy to slam it. All you have to do is say something negative and exaggerate it a little. You can’t exaggerate how good something is, because people will try it, feel disappointed and then become extroverted in their anger. So I should really mention the good points of Songbird.
Firstly, it has an excellent UI. It’s like iTunes meets Windows Media Player (The iTunes colour and the Windows Media Player layout). It looks great. Just like FireFox, it’s relatively small and clean (until you install add-ons, of course). It’s attractive, friendly, and just the right balance of simple and complex. It’s not overly simple like iTunes and it’s not overly complicated like others.
It also has an inbuilt web browser. While iTunes has technically had this for a long time, it’s been restricted to Apple’s iTunes Store servers and the iTunes servers only, which is a shame as Googling a band, for example, can be very useful. I know you can use a web browser, but imagine being recommended a song by iTunes’ Genius function and then looking up the band in Google within the same window. It cuts out an extra step. And with add-ons in Songbird, it’s all the more necessary.
And on the same note, one thing I’ve always wanted in iTunes is a tabbed iTunes Store. Songbird provides a tabbed interface. Superb! You can open multiple sessions in multiple tabs and do multiple things at once.
Not to mention, on top of just the basics, Songbird comes with ‘out-of-the-box’ add-ons like Last.FM scrobbling and a feature that lets you find tickets for bands you’d be interested in, playing in local areas, as well as so many more little niceties that iTunes doesn’t and probably won’t include.
Overall, I’d say that Songbird is looking great. A few tweaks to make it more usable for myself, and I’d be sold. As I mentioned, I’d like support for my song-control keys, but things like Coversutra working with Songbird (which will probably happen eventually) will be the things that I’m waiting for before switching. And no doubt, as it grows, these things will appear. The future is looking optimistic for it, though. Just by looking at the Roadmap, you know it will flourish exceptionally.