Domingo 16 Nov 2008, 10:15

A few weeks ago, I was once again looking out for a good music player and library manager for my Linux Desktop. There were several aspects it should fit:

- No KDE dependencies, and if possible no Gnome dependencies either
- Last.fm scrobbling functionality
- Storing of media information only in tags
- Clean and structered GUI

I discovered that Amarok has a really lovely GUI and manages music really god, but relies heavily on Qt and other KDE libraries. Rhythmbox failed to load on my Ubuntu, but screenshots I found on the web told me that it isn't what I'd call efficient as far as the user interface is concerned. Several other alternatives at hand, like Quod Libet, didn't appear as a solution either.

Then I stumbled upon something called Songbird. At the first glance, it looked a bit like iTunes, a fact that almost made me ignore it right away because I really don't like iTunes for some reasons. But as it is only the GUI that resembles the Apple software,I decided to give it a try. I found an Ubuntu package at GetDeb and insalled it without any problems. I decided to use my notebook primarily as media player, so I watched out for an Ebuild and found one at Gentoo's Bugzilla.

The first thing that I liked about Songbird was the setup wizard that popped up when starting it the first time. It was really easy to get the path to my music set up and configure several other things. What I didn't read but realized in the first second was that Songbird is Mozilla (XUL) based and therefore highly customizable.

Songbird also has Last.fm support, you can scrobble, love/unlove and ban/unban tracks and activate/deactivate scrobbling on the fly. What is missing is a scrobbler cache, so music I listen to while offline could be scrobbled afterwards.

But the best thing about Songbird is the community - customer support is handled via Getsatisfaction.com and the community is very active. You can be sure to get a reply when asking a question or proposing a feature within minutes. Combining that with Gentoo makes support perfect ;) …

Songbird is a very young project and still lacks some important function, one of it being an equalizer. As Songbird as of version 1.0.0 relies on GStreamer as media core on all platforms, it should be easy to extend with GStreamer plugins. But as I already mentioned, the developers are very open-mindeed and the community is active.

Relying on third-party software like XUL or GStreamer from my point of view is a step in the right direction because for example, Firefox add-ons can easily be ported to Songbird, for an instance. Making this possible can ease open source development a lot!

All I can say is: Give Songbird a chance! Even if there are things missing right now, I am absolutely sure that it will grow to be one of the best media managers around … Be patient!