Songbird

After making my switch from Windows, One of the things that I really missed having was a quality music player. In Windows I had always used iTunes to organize and listen to my music. Then I made the switch and quickly realized that iTunes pretty much did not exist for me any longer. I began searching around to find the new music player that was going to be my replacement for iTunes.

I started out using Rythmbox and for a default music player, it's quite a nice program. It has some pretty nice features, like the ability to listen to internet radio. Also it was able to scrobble with my last.fm account and even play songs from there. However, I began to feel that it was not the right program for me. I don't feel that the method used to organize my music was up to par and to me that's pretty important. I them began searching again...

After searching around for another program to try and use, I stumbled on Amarok. In the beginning I thought it was great. It was able to scrobble my last.fm and it managed my music collection to my satisfaction. The next thing I say may make people think that I am vain, but to each his own... The biggest reason why I stopped using Amarok was because I use Gnome, and as most people know Amarok is designed for KDE. This fact does not allow the program to really mesh with my desktop enviornment. That's also something that is very important to me. I like uniformity, and Amarok was breaking things for me. My search continues...

One thing I have not talked about yet it my loyalty to Mozilla. I think that Mozilla is a fantastic company and the software that they create is phonomenal. So when I discovered that Mozilla was creating a music player, I naturaly wanted to give it a try. Songbird was brought to me...

In the beginning it was pretty rough, it had it's share of bugs. However, it's a Mozilla product, Mozilla has quite a good track record of fixing their bugs... I persisted. Over time the bugs went away and the program really started to take shape and mature. One of the best things about Mozilla is the fact that it is open source software. This gives people the ability to create extentions for it, the same way that Firefox, Sunbird, & Thunderbird have extentions. I was able to modify the program to completely fulfill all of my needs and desires in a music player. Except one...

One of the biggest drawbacks about Songbird is that it does not have GTK+ integration yet. This was almost ok since there are plenty of feathers (themes) to choose from. However, my desktop got to a point when the color scheme just did not match any of the available feathers out there. Needless to say, I was quite bummed out.... until I discovered a special extention that saved me...

Enter System...

I don't know if people call System a feather or something else, but it definately made me quite happy. You see, System, allows Songbird to integrate with the computers current color scheme. Notice that I used the word "computer" and not Ubuntu. The reason for this is because System was originally designed in Windows and is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. I must say, it works quite well too. It matches my desktop enviornment almost flawlessly. There are a few oddities in the extention, but the creator seems to work quite dillegently on getting those things squared away.

If you're in the hunt for a quality music player, I strongly suggest using Songbird, It's well worth it.


Songbird