ExpanDrive

http://www.songbirdnest.com/

I’ve never really liked iTunes. I’ve dealt with it since I switched completely to Mac OS (right about when I joined the Magnetk team), but it’s been tough. My specific problem with iTunes is its poor handling of streaming playlists. I like the Winamp interface, where the playlist is king, and the library is a master of its own domain, but they can communicate pretty easily through drag’n'drop. Not so with iTunes, where the library takes precedence over playlists. There’s no clean way to do what I liked to do with Winamp, which is highlight five songs from a random folder and have them open in a new Winamp playlist to play. Opening songs with iTunes sticks them in the library, where there is no way to reorder them on the fly. M3U playlists are pain to use as well. I have a bunch of those, and the only way I’ve found to work with them is to open iTunes, create a new playlist, drag in the m3u file, then play the first few seconds of each song. Why that last part? iTunes doesn’t query the metadata of the tracks until they play, so I can’t even tell what songs they are. Ugh.

So I’ve been watching Songbird for awhile, mostly because they promised a stable Mac client that is one-third Winamp, one-third iTunes (mostly the music store third), and one-third Mozilla browser. They’ve delivered. It’s not quite as fully-featured as Winamp (yet; Winamp is version 5, after all). But it’s completely open source and uses XUL, the Mozilla “User Interface Language”. Anyone who’s ever written a Firefox extension can try their hand at extending Songbird. There are a bunch of add-ons already available. The first one I grabbed is called “now playing”, and it replicates the Winamp-style playlist.

Some of you may be wondering why there’s a built in web browser. The answer is that it’s not some silly webTV-type tack-on. It’s wholly integral to the way Songbird links to the world. To this end, it adds some wonderful features to the standard Mozilla-style browser. My favorite is the way it scans every page for media content and automatically creates a playlist for you. If you frequent music blogs that post mp3s, this is an awesome feature. The library is very similar to Winamp’s, and there’s even a nice “downloads” tab.

Songbird is everything I’ve wanted in a media player, and it’s open source to boot. I’m very excited to write some extensions. I’ll post them here when I do.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.