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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What problem are they trying to solve? A non-Applfied itunes-like app, that doesn't force you to install quicktime and iPodService.exe and other crapware.
What market are they after? Well, I might consider buying an iPod now that it isn't tethered to freakin iTunes.
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.
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.