*Note: You might also like my newer article on Songbird and eMusic*
Songbird looks like it is shaping up to be the cross-platform, open-source iTunes replacement I’m looking for, with some really great integration with the larger music web– It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with **the rest of the internet**.
Browse to any web page with links to music, and it *becomes* a playlist. Songs play instantly, and saving them to your library becomes a single-click or drag-and-drop operation.
The application isn’t quite there yet, or at least it was kind of slow and crashy on my only-a-year-old-yet-showing-it’s-age iBook G4. Most of the instability went away when I trashed the settings folder (~/Library/Application Support/Songbird) and started over again.
If they fix those problems, my wish-list is short:
* Manage portable players. I’m an iTunes user first and an iPod user second– if Songbird supports *other* large-capacity MP3 players, that’d be one less bit of lock-in, but I would appreciate iPod support as well.
* Import an iTunes library, ratings, playlists, cover art, and all
* iTunes-style smart playlists
* Deeper eMusic integration, Songbird should take over for eMusic Download Manager.
This is a project worth watching, both in terms of seeing how it grows and watching their screencast right now. I am doubly appreciative for the screencast, since it pointed me towards Scissorkick and a sample from the new Bonobo album I mentioned last week.
**more**: it looks like some of my wish-list items are being taken care of as third party extensions. That’s probably the main benefit of building off of Mozilla– the extension API’s and theming mechanisms have been in the wild for most of a decade.
**more**: Smart playlists are already implemented:
2 Comments
Could this be what I am looking for to listen to ICYG via my Mac? I will have to try this out later, I noticed it says it has Ogg Vorbis support.
any luck?
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[...] I’ve already written about Songbird in this space, but I haven’t written much about eMusic. For the purposes of this article, I’ll just say that I’m a big fan and leave it at that. I’ll expand on that in a later piece, if I can find a way to do it without sounding like a rabid fanboy. [...]
[...] the topic of eMusic, since I’ve already written about Songbird and the eMusic extension for Songbird, I figure I ought to cover eMusic’s own cross-platform, [...]
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