Songbird 1.0 Poised to Rule the Jukebox Roost
The first release candidate for Songbird 1.0 is now available and contains all the features slated for the final release. Songbird, which is a free, open source media player built on the same technologies underlying Firefox, is just about ready to take on iTunes.
Unfortunately “just about” and “actually ready” are two different things. Songbird still has some lingering bugs to overcome, particularly for those looking to smoothly transition from iTunes to something much better.
Given that many of Songbird’s potential converts have large iTunes libraries already, ensuring that users are able to easily switch over to Songbird is key. After all, Firefox would have far fewer converts if you couldn’t import you Internet Explorer bookmarks, which is essentially what Songbird struggles with.
That said, the first release candidate has much to offer and is an improvement over the betas we looked at earlier.
The big news in this version of Songbird is that GStreamer is now the main media playback system on all platforms (not just Linux, where it originated). GStreamer allows Songbird to have a cross platform code-base and, according the developers, offers better performance, better reliability, and more plugin options than alternative like QuickTime. You can read more about the reasoning behind Songbird’s decision to use GStreamer on the Songbird blog.
While the underlying support of GStreamer isn’t necessarily a flashy or even noticeable part of the app, it means that Songbird has a strong foundation on which to build.
Indeed, as with nearly every release, Songbird RC1 is much faster. The lags and stutters when scrolling large libraries that have dogged Songbird since the very early releases are gone. Startup times are still a bit slow, though, as with iTunes, startup times are largely dependent on the size of your music library.
However, while Songbird is definitely getting close to a final release it still isn’t perfect. The speed gains and unified playback engine are great, but as with virtually all the releases I’ve tested, Songbird still chokes when importing iTunes libraries and playlists.
When I tested the latest release candidate, Songbird dutifully detected and offered to import my iTunes library. The process appeared as though it would take around twenty minutes (I have somewhere are 120,000 tracks in iTunes), which isn’t too bad since it’s a one time import.
Unfortunately the app hung up with only a fraction left to go in the progress bar and was unable to recover.
Worse, after I force quit Songbird, relaunching the app caused it to hang and required yet another force quit. In fact, the only way I was able to get Songbird to successfully restart again was by trashing the preferences and Application Support files, which had apparently been corrupted somehow.
I then tried a different tactic, telling Songbird to simply import my music from a folder to start with. That worked without a hitch and took a mere minute or two. Then I went into the preferences and started an iTunes import again. That was two hours ago, it’s still hung up.
The short story — there are some bugs still lingering in the Songbird release candidate. However, outside of the iTunes import issues, I found this release to be remarkably stable and bug free. Browsing MP3 blogs, downloading files, installing add-ons and a myriad of other things worked just fine.
If you’d like to give this version a try, head over to the Songbird Nightly Builds page and download a copy for your platform. Just be sure to use the bug reporting features if you have any issues.
For the rest of us, hopefully it won’t be too much longer before Songbird reaches a stable, fully function 1.0 release. We’ll be sure to keep you posted.
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