"Songbird"

For those of you who may not know, I’m idly keeping an eye out for replacements for 3 programs I use quite a bit – Windows Media Player, Outlook and Offline Files.  The other day I thought I’d download Songbird to test it out as a replacement for Windows Media Player.

Let’s start by reviewing what I like and don’t like about Windows Media Player (version 12 on Windows 7).  I like the library alot, the finer points of library organisation aside I like how it can organise my music by albums, artist, genre and a whole load of other ratings.  Navigation around the library feels natural and I can easily add whatever it is I’m looking at to whatever play list I’m editting.  I also think that the interface looks clean and uncluttered.

What I don’t like is Windows Media Player’s feeble attempts to organise my videos, it’s lack of compatibility for H.264.  I do like how the UPnP\AV sharing links to my library, but when my library isn’t including the video I want to watch it’s a bit annoying.  Another pet peeve of mine is the program’s contempt for album art, with most images being shrunk to 300x300 pixels which isn’t even big enough to be displayed nicely on the portable pocket device of the millenium.  I also think that the lack of integration with online stores is a bit annoying.  Since using Steam I’m coming round to the idea that some kind of online media purchasing service from which I could quickly and easily buy new music and that would allow me to re-download my purchases as some kind of cloud based backup would be a welcome addition.  Having just clicked on the Online Stores button, Windows Media Player has offered me the overwhelming choice of 0 online stores, and even if it had, the integration would have been a bit janky.  Also Windows Media Player often seems to take a few minutes to catch up with the world, something a bit snappier would be nice.

So… Songbird.  If I had to sum up Songbird in one word it would be underwhelming.  Songbird is a cross platform media player built using the same XUL framework as that quali… appal… other browser Firefox.  If you thought that Windows Media Player was a lumbering Wolly Mammoth, you’ve never experienced the glacial pace of Songbird as it ponders the creation of a new tab to let you download an addon.

Talking of addons (a major selling point of Songbird) I looked on the Songbird addon site and saw a few addons that looked good, some nice media views and themes and then discovered that they weren’t compatible with the latest version of Songbird that I’d downloaded.  What is the point in offering up addons for out of date software?  And what is the point in featuring addons for said out of date software?  Media players are the kind of software that you update frequently, particularly if you’ve gone miles out of your way to download and use Songbird!  Installing addons wasn’t exactly a smooth experience either, every addon required a restart and the themes often required downloading and installing twice before Songbird realised I did actually want to install them and then it needed a further restart to apply correctly.  On the plus side, I have found a half decent theme that stops Songbird looking like iTunes dipped in a purple paint bucket.

After installing Songbird, it scanned my music folders and found my library used what Windows Media Player refers to as Contributing Artists (and treats secondly to the Album Artist) as the primary artist I wanted to arrange everything by so my collection is a little out of sorts when arranged by Artist. Out of the box, the Songbird library isn’t much to write home about, but once you managed to trick Songbird into installing a few Media Views things … get little better.  I did manage to find a Media View that would give me a listing of artists with some jazzy album art, but when I tell it to use the Album Artist it decided that every other entry is ‘Various Artists’.  The Media View I downloaded didn’t really work how I wanted to, I like being able to have a list of albums or artists and double click to get a list of their songs.  I find it natural and it means I’m never wasting half the screen with a list of songs that filters once you select an album (which is how the Media View worked).  With Songbird being extensible and open source I could make one myself, but I don’t care that much when you bare in mind that A) Songbird is slow, B) I’m not going to be using it that much, C) Windows Media Player works that way for music nicely and D) Songbird is slow.

On the plus side it does play music.  And it does have plugins for integrating with online music sites, lyrics, metadata providers and a rather cool plugin that tells you when bands in your library are in concert (except you couldn’t see the choices in the them I was using) or have new albums and singles out.

However it is slow and it does (like the world’s worst media player) lack a Now Playing playlist (although it does seem to make a new playlist to which you can add files).  You can also only monitor one folder for files to be automatically added to the library (so video and music in separate places is out), oh and it’s slow.

In summary: Songbird is a nice idea, but is missing some necessary speed and lickable user interface.

Oh and did I mention it’s a bit slow.