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.
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