The Songbird media player, which aims to become the Firefox of jukebox software, continues to progress with recent builds focusing on performance enhancements. In case you’re unaware, Songbird is a web-enabled media player that makes it dead easy to browse, download and manage all of the media files out there on the web. Think of it as a mix of Firefox and iTunes. 

Songbird is one of our favorite music apps, but sadly its performance is subpar when faced with a sizable music library. Thankfully, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the company behind Songbird, recently released a nightly build demonstrating some impressive performance gains with large libraries.

Keep in mind that the release I used is what the Songbird team refers to as a “blessed” nightly; you don’t need to compile it from source, but it’s definitely alpha quality software.

That said, I’m happy to report that for the first time Songbird was actually able to scan and index all 140 GB worth of my music without issue. Once your library is imported, browsing through it, filtering by artist or album and even just scrolling no longer causes Songbird to hang, freeze or choke completely.

In short, version .6 of Songbird, due to arrive in June 2008, will be the first useable release.

The performance gains will be most noticeable in the Linux and Windows versions of Songbird where developers have turned on some of the same memory optimization tools found in Firefox 3. The Songbird blog claims that the performance improvement is “about 15-20 percent, depending on task.”

Now granted Songbird still has a way to go before it will replace iTunes or other jukebox software. While it finally seems to able to handle decent size libraries, scanning them will still bring your PC to a standstill. In my case it made my Mac essentially unusable for half an hour; iTunes and Amarok are both able to import the same library without crippling my PC. On the bright side, at least the scanning process only happens once.

I didn’t try importing my iTunes playlists since the plug-in that handles those features doesn’t work with the nightlies.

I continue to use the more stable, Songbird .5 release on a regular basis, but I don’t use it to manage my music library. Instead I set up a separate library for Songbird and use it for browsing and downloading tracks from my favorite MP3 blogs, which is where Songbird really sings.

If you’d like to test the latest “blessed” nightly, you can download a copy from the Songbird Nest. If you’re not up for running a nightly build, check out the video below which shows the latest release in action.

See Also:

• Songbird Inches Toward Becoming The Firefox Of The Jukebox
• Why Songbird Will Change Your Life
• Songbird Plays the Musical Web
• What to Do With 90,000 Songs?