Songbird is an open-source customizable music player thats under active development. It is based on the Mozilla platform and the ability to customize the program is huge. Loads of add-ons available! More info »
I've heard too many complaints about this software being a little heavy on resources. I've been a Winamp user for years and still love it. It's super lightweight but does everything I need it to. Songbird definitely looks promising though.
Doesn't satisfy me, requires much resources and isn't as responsive and fast as I'd like.It does have alot of features inbuilt though, lyrics, information lookup, album art and so on...I'll see how the software will develop.
I've been happily using Songbird since about version 0.8. It was pretty great then, and it keeps getting better.
I use Ubuntu and gave Songbird a try because of the amount of likes on the website. I have to say I it a lot especially with some of the plugins.
"like" was definitely supposed to be in the last sentence
I used this at about version 0.8 or 0.9 and it didn't have quite enough features so I switched to Winamp. Now that it appears to have grown some I'm thinking about switching back.
Isn't Songbird developed by Mozilla?
I do not believe Songbird is developed by Mozilla.
Very cool player, but it's a resource hog. Runs "sluggish." Sometimes songs even cut off before the end as if the mp3 file was corrupt, if I replay, the song still cuts off where it last did.
This -could- be the best audio player for Windows, but needs a lot of work first.
Foobar is the best alternative, IMO.
It's not developed by the Mozilla community, but it's developed on some of Mozilla's technology and platforms: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/technologies.htmlIt's very similar to the Firefox and Thunderbird experience.
Feels more like a web browser with a music playing feature to me. Nearly all the setting in preferences are about how to display websites and change the UI, and is hugely lacking music-related settings and features like foobar & winamp boasts.
I have tried several versions and I never got the podcast download to work, I give up, I'll use gtkpod which does also have a debian package.
My Songbird currently is using 134 MB of RAM. Even so, it runs like a beauty on this machine, and is getting better with each version. I also like how much more customisable than iTunes it is.
The application looks nice and has decent functionality, but it's a resource hog just like Firefox.
I really want to like this, but it's just not as snappy as iTunes and the add-ons for things like cover-flow and grid view don't work as well as I'd like. When they add video support this will become a lot more interesting I think.
I believe Songbird is best run with FireFox, Mozilla, etc... I tried Songbird with my Internet Explorer and every Songbird update seemed to make it more difficult to run IE.Songbird is insidious browser hijacker. I may be wrong but I believe it's a Mozilla program designed to win you over to their browser.
Songbird is lousy and I've wasted a lot of time trying to make it work. Great idea, poor execution.
Would love to switch to this, but podcast support is non-existent and has been constantly scrapped from every release roadmap.
I'm running Songbird on a Windows XP Professional SP3 computer and I like it even if it runs a bit "heavy". Hope that developers do more performance improvements.
Does a nice job of editing tags, but fails everwhere else. Especially bad due to a UI that doesn't fit in with anything else on your system, and a brutal amount of resource hogging.
* Totally lacks podcast support.* History of the "roadmap" is that podcast support gets perennially postponed, so don't take seriously any promise that it's coming in the next version. * Serious resource hog.* Lots of extra un-necessary features (e.g., it's a full-blown web browser, intended as a replacement for Firefox for all your music needs), but no attention to really important features (like podcast subscription).
My recommendation at this point, having followed the project from the start, is to wait at least another year. Right now, it's just not there.
Poti deny this being an itunes alternative and as a Mac owner Songbird sucks balls!!!! no device support, resource hog, you need to make playlist of the songs you want to play {you cant just let it go through your music and play the next track?}, it can and has messed up peoples meta data, it's slow, I've waited up to a minute for a song to start playing, no more ipod support {they made the ipod add-on open source but it never seems to get all that much attention, Philips has just come on board and POTI are as always consumed with Windows support over Mac & Linux finding any excuse to not show us any real support for OS X and Linux so it isn't a true cross platform app. they are also more concerned with features like concerts that are on even though you must live in big capital cities new york and the like. they love people who suck up to them but if you point out any short comings in Songbird they can't take it!!!they don't respond to any Crash reports { I guess unless you are on Windows I don't know}.I've had constant problems With updating the app and add-ons, I've ended up downloading the latest versions from their website every time and the add-ons seem to become unsupported as fast as they are released.I think they need to work out if Songbird is a media player or a web browser [ if it's going to be a web browser I can't see it taking on Firefox or even Google Chrome?] they have a lot of good ideas but their attitude and implementation leaves a lot to be desired
With the 1.4 release I've finally warmed to Songbird. I wouldn't say it's trouble free, although it runs fine, not a resource hog, and plays my songs fine. I reported two bugs to the development team, and they we're promptly fixed;
-Pause while trying to play a song, because Songbird is trying to find some artwork-Errors appearing in the debug console
Anyway, can't wait for the next release. Goodbye iTunes, you never supported FLAC, so I never liked you much.
The official developers stopped developing the iPod device plugin, and noone else has taken over yet. So if you've been using Songbird to manage your iPod, you're currently out of luck here and should look elsewhere.
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