Songbird
Current Homepage: http://songbirdnest.com/
Created by: “The Songbird Team”
Abstract
Songbird may spawn a new breed of media players. The application’s paradigm of “playing the web” provides a fresh media experience currently only for the adventurous.
Synopsis
What was the impetus for beginning use of Songbird? I liked iTunes, but got tired of the DRM‘d music.
With what other programs did I compare it? Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes
How technical do you have to be to use Songbird? Be a nerd, be very a nerd.
Who do I believe will benefit the most from using it? Those who like to preview applications in the early development stages.
Do I recommend Songbird for general use? As of this writing no. I only recommend it for those who like to experiment with new software.
The Details
When iTunes first came out I celebrated. I could finally buy just the songs I wanted at only $0.99 a pop. My library of songs grew. I bought a first generation iPod from a friend. Loved the 10 Gigabytes of music it held, along with the cool, oldschool mechanical wheel.
The novelty passed. Carrying around the iPod “brick” became annoying. My old car, a Ford Focus SE, had a CD/MP3 player in the dash and a permanent impression of my butt in the drivers seat. Since the iPod was an old version 1, there wasn’t any converter I could find that connected it to my radio. Not a problem, I thought, I’ll just make an MP3 CD of my iTunes library music.
News to Jeremy: all of the music I bought from the iTunes Music Store could not be translated onto an MP3 CD. The music was protected by Apple’s special DRM called FairPlay.
It may be hard to believe in this day and age, but I have a legal music library, and I was annoyed at Apple for “selling” me protected music. I spent a lot of time in my car, and I wanted the opportunity to make long, MP3 CDs with the music I legally owned.
Found a nice way to crack the DRM on all of my iTunes protected music. After all the effort to get a library full of unprotected MP3s, I decided to take a look and see what other Media Players existed. Lots of people survived just fine without an iPod and iTunes. Why should I keep using them if all I was going to do was buy some music and then waste extra time cracking the files I purchased?
Another internet search turned up the following video, which demonstrates how Songbird works better than I could describe.
The video, simple as it looks, showed me things I had been missing. Before this, I had no idea that there were such things as MP3 blogs, robust music stores other than that provided by Apple, and lots of Creative Commons licensed music available for download.
It didn’t take long to remove iTunes from my computer. Songbird loaded up nice and easy. I dropped in my well organized music library and things started working immediately.
I find it hard to give a full review of Songbird when they openly admit the following:
Songbird is not yet fully-developed or bug-free.
Yes, I find little bugs and errors in it every time I use it. Hell, it’s version 0.25, bugs are expected! Even so, I look forward to each release just like those crazy Mac owners look forward to the next dot release of their Mac OS. (I just downloaded Version 0.3 of Songbird while writing this. YAY DOT RELEASE!)
Bugs aside, I love Songbird for the freedom it provides, especially in terms of support for:
- MPEG Audio (mpga)
- MPEG Layer 3 (mp3)
- MPEG4 family including FairPlay (m4a, m4v, mp4, m4p, m4b)
- Ogg Vorbis
- Speex
- AAC
- WMA
- WMADRM
- FLAC
- and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR.
Conclusion
Songbird is fun like every application should be. Use it now only if you like to try new things.
A short review is appropriate for this pre-release application. A long review will come when the long-awaited application is complete.
Comments (3)
OK, so I’m a nerd. I’m also a musician. And I’ve got a huge mp3 library, ripped from CD’s that I own. So I’m interested in Songbird — which I’d never heard of before.
I NEVER bought an Ipod — refused to do so because of the DRM limitations. Instead, I recently bought a Creative Zen and some very expensive ear buds. Still I don’t use them very much — because, being a nerd, I’m always sitting at my computer, listening to my mp3 library there.
Problem is, I’ve never found a media player that I like very much. SONGBIRD may be the answer.
THANKS, Jeremy, for bringing it to my attention.
On second thought, maybe I’m not so much of a nerd after all. I’m still trying to figure out the best way of organizing my mp3 collection and to set up playlists. I’ve been considering jRiver Media Center or Foobar, but have yet to install either — and they would take me away from Songbird.
Any suggestions about how to organize the mp3
library?
Hi Tom,
There are lots of ways to organize digital music libraries. Since I used iTunes previously, I took advantage of the “Consolidate Library” function often and regularly. The method I used to migrate from iTunes to Songbird can be found here at the Micahville blog: How to Dump iTunes for an Open Source Upgrade.