Songbird

Freedom at last.

It's been tough for me to find "the definitive" music player for my personal use. Windows Media Player is a fine choice for playing music that "just works." However, I like having a few more advanced features: library support for organizing my music, instant search, CD ripping and burning, playlist support, and more importantly, an intuitive interface.

The de-facto standard for my media player of choice has been Winamp. First Winamp 2, briefly Winamp 3, and Winamp 5 for years now. It provides all the features I want, deep customizatoin, and most importantly, a user interface that gives me easy access to all of those features.

Since being acquired by AOL, however, Nullsoft hasn't been putting out the same quality Winamp releases that I've been hoping for, and Winamp 5.5 definitely steps away from the Winamp I know and love. Which means that I have been in the market for a new media player that fulfills my needs - obviously, no easy task.

Songbird is beginning to come awfully, close, however.

Songbird is an open source media player, built primarily on technology from Mozilla, including the Gecko rendering engine. What this essentially means is that Songbird shares a lot of technology with Firefox. This is important, as you'll see, because Songbird is built to be tightly integrated with the Internet, much more so than Winamp could ever be in its current form.

Below I highlight what I feel are the strongest and most unique features of Songbird.

• Interface: iTunes' interface tends to be love it or hate it, but from a usability standpoint, Apple really did nail it. iTunes is best at organizing a large collection of music, creating and editing playlists, and playing music, plain and simple. Songbird apes iTunes' interface almost 1:1, and I find this to be a good thing. The default "Gonzo" interface could be mistaken for iTunes by almost anyone, with solid whites and grays defined by sharp lines and curves in all the right places.
  

• Connectivity: As I already said, Songbird is built on some of Mozilla technology's, and actually shares the feature core of Firefox. This makes Songbird one part iTunes, one part awesome browser. This allows me to do my two most common tasks right next to one another: listen to music and browse the web. With the tabbed interface enabled, Songbird feels and acts just like Firefox, but with a permanent tab always available to access your music library. More importantly, Songbird allows the web to integrate with your music: Last.fm support is built right in, and album art for your music can be pulled from the web as you play your songs, among many other possibilities.
  

• Extensions: Another great feature carried over from Firefox, Songbird allows for the same extensibility as the popular browser, and in fact already shares many of the same browser add-ons. The ability to extend features of the core music library is great, though, especially with the ability to add new features that Songbird won't or hasn't supported yet.
  

• Compatibility: Songbird supports iTunes' style syncing with iPods and any MTP device, meaning that it's bloody easy to keep a huge music library synced with a portable device.
  

There are a few downsides to Songbird thus far, so here are those in all fairness:

• CD Ripping/Burning:There are a lot of features that Songbird simply doesn't have, either in the core package or via extensions. CD burning and ripping is something that would be great to have. This is coming in a future release, however, and hopefully it rocks as good as Winamp or iTunes' ripping (auto-tagging, album art, etc.).

• Customized sorting: As it is, you can only sort one column in your library/playlists at a time, which makes sorting by artist/album/track very difficult. This is a feature coming down the line, though.

• Configurable interface: I would like to see some components of the Songbird user interface configurable. If the playback controls don't suit me in a particular location, I would like to drag and drop them somewhere else. This level of interface customization is possible with add-ons (via skins), but I wouldn't mind being able to accomplish the same thing myself. Songbird's iTunes-esque interface is a solid start for a music player, but in order to draw in more users, an easily customizable interface would kick ass.

I highly recommend you try Songbird if you're in the market for a new music player / organizer. If you're on the fence, wait until April of 2009, when Songbird is expected to pick up CD ripping / burning and sorting. By then hundreds, if not thousands, of skins and extensions should be available too, meaning that Songbird can be whatever you make it to be.

It's certainly looking promising thus far. B3 out.