Hello Songbird

Two and a half years after I came across the first release and three and a half years after I mooted the notion of something similar, the Mozilla folks have released Songbird 1.0, a media player that, amongst other things, wants to make music more about the internet, whether it be about buying it or finding it when it’s in the wilds of the web.

There’s a nice Wired article about the release (thanks Anthony) which covers most of the issues but the main thing for me is, as someone who has an iPhone which is not currently supported by Songbird (mainly, I guess, because it syncs much more than just music) I can’t let go of iTunes. And nor would I want to as I kinda like it, having used the thing without complaint since 2001. But, for all its coziness iTunes has gotten a bit too attached to that pesky store for my liking and Songbird looks to sort out a lot of those issues.

So I was delighted to see that there appears (I say appears as I’ve only been playing with Songbird for about an hour) to be a way to continue to use both. When you go to import your iTunes library into Songbird you’re greeted with this lovely checkbox:

Fantastic. The only problem is getting iTunes to automatically sync with Songbird and while I’m sure there’ll be a handy plugin to do that coming soon enough (for either Songbird or iTunes – automatically adding files to iTunes isn’t hard) there’s a bodge of a solution. When you download a song in Songbird it, unless I’m missing something, just dumps it in a folder. So once you’ve done your music harvesting and fixed any rogue tags you can simply drag that folder into iTunes. Delete it from Songbird, do the sync and all should be good.

Of course I’ve not tested this yet…

But why use Songbird at all? Put it this way. Is your download folder full of mp3s? Do you get sick of right-click-save-as on links or digging through source code to find the location of a music file? Songbird does all that for you completely automagically. If there’s an mp3 on a page you can download it to your library in once click. And yes, File2HD works.

On the downside it looks like shit compared to iTunes but I guess the Windows division won’t care about that (meow!) and some of the functions are a bit clunky. But these things will improve.

And, since I’m an eternal iTunes user, I’m hoping this will kick Apple in the arse a bit regarding iTunes development outside of the bloody store and iPod/iPhone support just as Firefox forced Microsoft to raise their game with IE. Let the games begin!