I have been using Songbird, the Mozilla media player, for a few days. I like the idea that, unlike Media Player, it is not reporting back to Microsoft and the Bush administration everything I listen to. Because I am an old fogey, I have little to hide, but I still like the idea of a non-conglomerate media player.
Like Firefox, Songbird is free and open source. It is still at a developmental stage, but there are a number of useful add-ons already available. The screenshots above are the default interface, and the interface with a useful add-on that allows one to scroll through CD cover images. A few first impressions:
1. The major functions of the player, including accessing the music library, are based on Java, which makes for smooth integration of new features, but can make switching between functions or views quite slow, and prone to temporary freezes.
2. Otherwise, it works very well.
3. I don't find it as easy to scroll through and find music as in Media Player, but this may just be due to unfamiliarity. The three, progressively narrower fields in the default view work well to find music quickly, and, it seems to have tagged all of my albums by genre reasonably intuitively. The scroll-by-CD-cover feature is a nice way to browse every now and then, but is nothing new.
Some of you may be using this already -- I am interested in your impressions. Also, any ideas from anyone who has had more time to fiddle around and customize etc.
4 comments:
Just looking at the interface, it seems like an iTunes knockoff (which I use and like fairly well).
But I will respect my Poobah's opinions and check it out.
This is looking promising, and I do love Firefox. From ArsTechnica:
"The Songbird developers aim to create an open ecosystem for media technologies that will liberate users from the closed end-to-end media solutions offered by Microsoft and Apple. The monolithic media architectures used by those companies, which tie music stores to specific software players and specific devices, have stifled creativity and innovation. Songbird gives users a way to escape from vendor lock-in and also creates the potential for more competition and innovation in media services and digital content distribution."
Anything is better than Windows Media Player. I always thougth iTunes was pretty good. Does Songbird sync with players?
Yes, but I'm not sure it's quite ready for prime time. I played with it some this morning, and it seems a tad slow and buggy at times. It will definitely be a contender when 1.0 happens, though.
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