Songbird 1.2 – The Review

Managed to get this up earlier than I expected, as I realised that you don’t need to build it from source from the songbird website, I just needed to download it and run it.

So, to the new features:

• Equaliser:

  The equaliser is quite interesting. It works reasonably well. It has sliders for 10 frequencies, and is quite nice. It isn’t the best equaliser I have ever said, it lacks a few features that are planned (either by the songbird team, or by addons), such as presets and the ability to remember equaliser settings for each song. That is something that would be immense, and I would really love.

• Automatically managed folders:

  Well, now this is quite a cool, interesting feature now. It is quite useful. I’m sure most of you would know what it would do, but you can turn on what it calls “Managed Mode” on. This will allow you to choose the folder for your music, the folder heirarchy, and the file name, and when you change anything in the metadata, it will change them for you. Really useful I think. It works as well.

• 2-way sync with iTunes:

  Very useful feature, not for me, but for a lot of people who love Songbird, but also love the iTunes music store. Does exactly what it says on the tin…syncs with iTunes both ways. Means you can buy music in the iTunes music store, and it will sync with songbird. Create playlists in songbird, and they will sync with itunes, and you can then sync them to your iPhone or iPod touch (which currently aren’t supported in songbird). I don’t know how to do this feature, and I don’t have iTunes so I can’t try it and tell you if it works, but it seems really cool.

  This could also be used in conjunction with dropbox (or similar) to sync itunes on a mac, with linux or windows on another computer, or to sync several OS on 1 computer. It has huge potential.

• Last.fm:

  I don’t get what is new with this. My Songbird 1.1.1 has last.fm on it, but maybe that is just an addon. I don’t know, it might be that it was an addon, and is now part of the core. But still, it allows you to do everything with last.fm that you can on the website, and also allows you to scrobble.

• Performance enhancements:

  Not as many of these as there have been in previous releases, but lets try

  • Faster searching. Definitely obvious. Searching is almost straight away in my library (its only about 1000 items just now though, not sure what it will be like with really large ones.
  • Less CPU intensive. It seems to be less CPU intensive, but this isn’t an exact science
  • Multiple files. Supposodly deleting and selecting multiple files is faster. I can vouch for the selecting, but I don’t see why I would ever need to delete lots of files at once, so I don’t feel like trying that, I’ll take their word for it.
  • Fewer crashes. Obviously I can’t test this one until having it running for a while.

Future things:
They have quite a few interesting ideas for the next few releases. The august one will have device firmware update, MSC device support, playback of AIFF MS-ADPCM, WMA 1 & 2 and AAC LC, editing metadata of ASF and M4A files, improvements to metadata editor and transcoding.

Other things they need to get done before it can surpass the likes of Amarok and Banshee, are podcasting support (it really doesn’t work just now) and cd ripping, which will be included in the October release.

To be honest, I love this release, it has a few cool features, and we are getting closer to a fantastic media player. It really needs to get into the repos for Ubuntu, in my opinion, and I’ve outlined what it needs to add in above there.

This release has gone from ~79M to ~90M of RAM with 20 addons and playing music. This is not bad, but we need to make sure it doesn’t keep going up, but this is the only bad thing I can find about this release apart from features that don’t exist yet. I love Songbird, and I really want it to be a fantastic and popular Media Player

p.s It seems I was beaten by Alan Lord to put a review out on Songbird, ach well.

Songbird 1.1 – The Review

I have had a wee bit of time to look at Songbird 1.1 and decide what I think about it. This may take a while, so I may blog some of it today, and some tomorrow. But the blog won’t go out until I finish this. So you might be reading this bit on Sunday, but I’m actually writing this on Saturday. Woop!

NOTE: I added no addons during this review, unless stated.

• Watch Folders

Ok, so this may not be a very revolutionary thing, but it is something that is essential in a mainstream full media centre. And now Songbird has it. I have tested this out…and I have to say…it works better than any media centre I have ever used. One thing that I know annoys a lot of people with iTunes…is that when you delete a file…iTunes doesn’t delete it. So when you go to play it iTunes goes “Ahhhhh…can’t find this”, and you go “Grrrrr”. Well…when you do it with Songbird, the song dissapears straight away. I moved a song away from my watched folder, switched straight to Songbird, and it was not in my library anymore. I then put the file back in, switched back to Songbird…and it was there again. That is IMMENSE! I would tell everyone you need to see this…it is immense.

• 7 Digital Music Store

So…not the best thing ever…but still a step in the right direction. The 7 Digital Music Store does what it says on the tin…sells music. It is in no way as good as the iTunes Store yet…as you can only get music (no TV shows, films, etc) but hey…its something isn’t it. Singles are normally 79p (familiar at all) and albums are 7.99. All (as far as I can see) are in mp3 format, so…its not gonna get me off CDs yet…I want me some lossless music. It also has a recommended section which takes your most played music and gives you some recommended stuff.

What I want is

1. Integration of Amazon store
2. Lossless downloads
3. TV and film downloads.

Once we get that…Songbird will be able to compete with iTunes Store. Cause, although being a step in the right direction, it is not near being able to compete.

Now, I am going to bed…I need some sleep.
I shall finish this off tomorrow after lunch time.

• Playback

The playback is mostly really good. It sounds amazing, plays really well. I only have 1 problem with it…which I think is a problem to do with my computer rather than a problem to do with Songbird. It just takes a while to play a song. When it is playing a song, then straight onto the next, it is fine. But when I change the song myself, it takes a while. I think this is because my music is on a USB HDD.

Also, there is no play queue, but i have found an add-on that fixes this – http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/96 I haven’t tried it out myself, but someone on irc tried it out and told me it was good, but there are a few wee niggly issues with it. I can’t remember what they are though.

• Podcasts

Still as useless as every. This is where Songbird falls down. The podcasts just don’t work. At all.

• CPU and Memory

They say that their RAM usage is down by 40% and their CPU usage down by a huge amount. I say “Huzzah!”. They are correct. I am running firefox, songbird and a bunch of other things on my puny little laptop and only using 700MB of my 1GB of RAM, and my average CPU is about 40% just now. Songbird is playing as well. How cool is that!

• Album art

They have a nice way of searching for album art now. Its just Tools > Get album Artwork. Or Ctrl-shift-G. However…they don’t have the album art manager installed anymore, which means you can’t see which ones still don’t have album art. Not sure how to get around this so if anyone has any ideas…shoot.

Last but not least

• Concerts

I still love this thing. It allows you to see what bands in your library are playing near you. You can even add a column into your library to see who is doing it at any time. It is immense.

So yeah, all in all, Songbird 1.1 is a HUGE improvement…and is now well on the way to being a viable alternative to iTunes/WMP.

Songbird 1.1

Just a quick wee blog post. Songbird 1.1 was just released 2 hours ago. I really don’t have time this week to review it, but I will do as soon as I can. In the meantime, here are a few of the main features.

• Songbird can now Watch Folders. A necessary feature in any all-purpose media player, but one that Songbird has been lacking in. Until now!!! So…check that off your “I can’t use Songbird because it doesnt do *blank* and itunes does.” list.
• It has built in the 7-digital mp3 store. No idea if this is any decent…but it could be. Will have to try it out and see.
• It has “reduced memory use with a large library by 40%” and “Cut CPU usage during playback by half”. These are good…no?

Anyways, this is just a short overview of what Songbird 1.1 has in store. I will give you a fuller review some other time. Maybe this weekend..maybe not.
memory

Songbird 1.0

Songbird is finally stable. Well…officially anyways.

I’ve always found the whole 1.0 thing funny to be honest. Take WINE for example. It was “unstable” for 15 years. But what makes that stable or unstable? I’m not sure. I never had it crash on me before it was stable.

What actually makes something stable or unstable? Do there have to be a certain amount of crashes to be unstable? I’m not sure.

Anyway, this isn’t about stable/unstable. This is about the 1.0 release of Songbird.

Now as we all know…Songbird is nowhere near good enough to be a replacement for normal people of iTunes, Amarok or WMP (if WMP is really your thing, I never liked it at all).

For example…it cannot rip or burn cds. It cannot constantly watch a folder and add tracks to it. It does not work with media keys (unless you are running linux on i386 with the MMkeys addon). I cannot get podcasting to work.

But, although it isn’t as good as the big dogs yet…it is good enough for me to use it all the time. The only 2 things out of that list that annoy me are 1. folder watching and 2. media keys. Yes, I am running linux, but the addon doesnt work for 64 bit.

It does have loads of great things going for it:
1. Addons. Yes, some people may not like them…but I love them. I wanna be able to mod it.
2. Open source. “Wow” I hear some of you saying sarcastically. But seriously…this means that it will get updated more, it has a great community around it, etc etc.
3. The Browsing. I don’t use this very often. But for when you just have songbird open…say at a party…and you wanna show someone a youtube video or something…no need to bring up firefox, just “ctrl-t” and go to youtube.

This along with the fact that it looks well good if you skin it how you like it. Take a look at mine. I’m using YABS (Yet Another Black Skin).

There are also, of course, things that I really want them to change.

1. Native titlebars. This really annoys me…I want songbird to use the same titlebar as everything else in my computer…but it doesnt. There is talk about changing this so that it does…but we shall have to wait and see.
2. As I said before, the MMKeys and the Folder watching needs to be implemented.

Once I get those 3…I would be exstatic. Obviously they could slim it down a bit, because at this point in time, it is quite big. Granted, 3.5% of my 4GB of RAM isn’t huge…but I am a power user. I run thousands of things at once.

These are my thoughts on Songbird.