

Songbird 1.0 released - noisebleed
http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2008/12/02/songbird-10-is-here/

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unalone
Why do they call themes feathers? Yech.

On the Mac, it's set so that left-and-right scrolling becomes up-and-down
scrolling. That's ugly, because I often scroll top-right to down-bottom, and
Songbird stutters something ugly when I do that.

The display controls are unintuitive. It took be a while to figure out how to
control the browser.

The controls don't sync to my Play button. iTunes starts up. Yech.

I don't know how I'd test its speed compared to iTunes. But if I close it, the
music stops. It doesn't know to make itself a background process. Yech.

It shows my movies and TV shows as songs. It doesn't know enough even to
ignore it.

I do like how they made their interface deliberately un-Maclike, unlike
Firefox, which tries and fails horribly. But I don't like that they ignore Mac
shortcut schemes.

~~~
jonursenbach
All software has problems.

~~~
unalone
Yeah. And I always give negative feedback. I complain about things about
iTunes, too.

When people are looking to see if they will want a piece of software, the best
indicator of if you'll want it is whether or not you can stand the negatives.
And HN's a big enough place where I think the developers might look at this
post, and fix those problems. I'd love to have a viable iTunes competitor.

~~~
ivank
foobar2000 has been eating iTunes' lunch for 6 years.

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unalone
No Mac version, sadly.

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nihilocrat
Can you use Wine on a Mac?

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unalone
I THINK you can, but I've always avoided it. I'm not a fan of non-native ports
of software.

Not to mention: I really do like iTunes day-to-day. I hate adding album art to
it (you can't drag images onto albums in album mode), but on the Mac it's
quick and very responsive, and it's got excellent search.

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pedalpete
how many years to get to v.1? and reviews of bad implementations and buggy.
What problem are these guys trying to solve? what market are they after?

Though I don't deny there is a market for alternative players (foobar2000,
MusicIP Mixer), i've never understood what songbird was really offering that
made them standout and get all the press they do.

~~~
unalone
Perhaps the Mozilla backing? When this was introduced, I remember Digg falling
over itself and calling this a revolutionary product. This was after Firefox 2
came out and could do no wrong.

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nihilocrat
Hey, this reminds me of Firefox 3!

Installed. Booted. Crashed to desktop. Reinstalled with no extensions.
Wondered why I couldn't import any music. Noticed that the music was imported,
it's just that no text was displaying in the library. Played a few songs and
started paying attention to something else. Noticed that it suddenly crashed
for no apparent reason.

Back to using foobar2000...

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mstefff
Any get multimedia keys to work under linux? Got the addon installed but, of
course, it doesn't do what it's supposed to do..

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nuclear_eclipse
I still want/need the ability to use DAAP shares from Rhythmbox, or even UPnP
shares from Mediatomb, et al...

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mstefff
Are they like not allowed to test the addons, cause most of them don't work at
all...

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bprater
How does this compare to iTunes?

~~~
Zev
poorly.

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mstefff
Where can I get a deb?

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jrp
It's not source; just unzip and run songbird.

However, it didn't work for me. It ran and imported media, but closed when I
tried to play.

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mstefff
Yea, I noticed, but I'd rather it be installed properly.

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jmtame
Also check out www.onellama.com (no downloads).

