It’s a simple equation. Results = Developers x Time; and for Songbird, it’s not working out. Yesterday, they announced they will drop Linux support in favour of Windows, Mac and to meet plans to include video features in the next release. The comments are intensely angry, as you can imagine. An untested Linux version will be kept around “for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform”.
At first I was like WTF…but after thinking about it for a minute I wasn’t too hurt as I don’t really use it on my Ubuntu machines. As Linux has some really good music players like Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok etc. So I am ok, as I only use it on my Win7 partition when I boot it once in a while.
As Linux has some really good music players like Rhythmbox
I’ve heard people bashing Rhythmbox quite often, but I personally find it exceedingly good; it doesn’t try to cram the whole kitchen sink in it, it doesn’t try to play videos or stuff like that, and I find it pretty fast and easy on resources. Atleast more so than the competition.
Yep I know that is why I love it, plus I can listen to my last.fm stations if I want to listen to some songs that aren’t on my hard drive.
I’ll bite!
Rhythmbox is straight to the point, and a good workhorse, but it lacks elegance and polish and consistence. The tray icon have been in a state of flux for quite some time now. In gnome 2.24 it did this, in gnome 2.26 it did that, then in gnome 2.28 it was switched out for a plugin instead of a core component and did another thing, i don’t know what it does in 2.30 though. It’s a surprise i guess.
Rhythmbox is also “persistent” in the sense that it remembers the “hidden” (or iconified if you will) mode when starting it up (from the previous session), and there is no way to disable that other than disassociating the main window from the notification icon (which now doesn’t hide the window from the title bar when iconified).
It’s not persistent when it comes to the last used item in the sidebar though, nor what item in the playlist you were at when you, say, rebooted your computer. That means it’ll start iconified, but a the first song, in the library, every time. What’s the window persistence good for if it doesn’t remember source and playlist position anyway?
Nor dies it remember what source list items are expanded or unexpanded between sessions. Unless something has been done about it in recent months, that is.
I want to use rhythmbox, but it gets on my nerves every time i give it a “second try”
Not to be taken as an insult or criticism,… almost all of your comments contain the phrase kitchen sink
Not to be taken as an insult or criticism,… almost all of your comments contain the phrase kitchen sink
Damn, I never thought anyone would pay enough attention to notice that! I just love certain phrases and I’ve come to use them rather extensively, my favorite one being “rabid mouth-breathing troglodyte” when addressing a really persistent or aggressive troll..
Well, time for a new phrase then, I guess!
Troglodyte as in “half man, half ape with the strength of twenty demons” (with the strength of a demon being about 1/10th that of a normal person) or as in “a … small passerine birds in the wren family”?
Troglodyte as in “half man, half ape with the strength of twenty demons” (with the strength of a demon being about 1/10th that of a normal person) or as in “a … small passerine birds in the wren family”?
I’d say the former, though perhaps closer to the ape.
But 20 demons of which a single demon has the strength of 1/10th of a normal human being would mean twice as strong as a normal human, and half an ape would then be just as strong as a human, right?
So, in essence, a rabid half-man, half mouth-breathing troglodyte would only be about 1.5 times the strength of a normal human being while intellectually about 0.75 or even less if we assume such an ape was only half as intelligent as humans. The rabid condition most likely would reduce the thinking capacity somewhat, and “mouth-breathing” refers to a particularly unintelligent one, so perhaps a value of 0.5 would be more correct?
Could somebody explain just what Songbird brings to the table that VLC,MPLAYER or say Totem doesn’t?
If it’s some kind of kind of front-end for a subscription service,sorry not interested.
Neither of the three above mentioned programs are music management software, just file players. That being said, Songbird didn’t bring much to the table anyway as compared to Rhythmbox/Banshee/etc. There were parts of it that I did like, such as its 7Digital music store integration and automatic lyric search, but over all it was just too bloated and suffered from some serious creeping featuritis while lacking some essential features of music management software such as the ability to play and rip audio cds.
Count another one among the Rhythmbox croud, I used it before and after I tried songbird and I never really understood a lot of the criticism aimed at it either save for some of the UI inconsistencies.
That being said, this doesn’t make much sense for Songbird. Why keep Mac when iTunes comes preloaded on all Macs and, even considering iTunes is a bit bloated, Songbird is a dozen times worse? Who’s going to use it over iTunes? Personally, I think Winamp has a lot of the Windows users (those that don’t use iTunes or WMP), iTunes has got most of the Mac croud by the balls, and there’re lots of music players and management software for *NIX. As bloated as Songbird is (anything based on XUL starts out bloated) and given its slapdash of features, I’m not sure how long it will last in general on its own. If Nokia or some other phone company picked it up and made it the primary sync software for their devices then maybe. As it is though, it just doesn’t have much appeal over better alternatives.
Neither of the three above mentioned programs are music management software, just file players. That being said, Songbird didn’t bring much to the table anyway as compared to Rhythmbox/Banshee/etc.
I’m still not sure what the big deal over Songbird and other software similar to it *IS* since I don’t use them.
I just play mp3 video and other files using vlc or totem, and just plug my mp3/video player in a usb slot and copy the files I want off the harddrive over to the mp3 player under Fedora
You’re not the target user of the software, and thus obviously don’t need it. It’s like trying to explain what the big deal about matlab is to someone who only needs a calculator.
I’ve been quite happy with Rhythmbox of late; earlier versions were buggy for me but it seems to have gained a lot of support in the community recently and it shows.
I’ve tried Songbird on all three platforms and I honestly just don’t care for it. The Windows port was especially bad on Windows 7.
This is something I’ve never understood: sooner or later people start cramming all kinds of new stuff in what was supposed to be a MUSIC player. Well, I guess I don’t belong in the target audience then as I use a separate video player for playing videos.
I’d love to switch to some other player than Songbird, but I just don’t seem to be able to find anything suitable. I hate Winamp and all those that try to look like it, I just the Songbird/iTunes-like interface, but it seems all of those are either really buggy or really slow.. Would be awesome if there was a music player that just concentrated on exactly that: music playing, and was fast and light on resources.
Yeah, I have used songbird extensively in linux. It had a lot of potential initially as a project, but it ended doing a lot of things… without being remarkably good at any of them. The feature creep in later release was maddening, because it added nothing to the experience/functionality. Now it looks more like a webrowser which happens to play music, I have no idea where that concept is supposed to take the user experience to, but I didn’t care to stick around to find out. And I gave up using it, esp. when any small change in preferences or a minor update in a plug in involves a restart of the program. That points towards some very significant design issues, which is retarded if you start a project from scratch with such obvious obstacles to scalability/portability (since they seemed to be trying to position themselves as the dominant player for alternative platforms ignored by microsoft and apple)
Trying to compete in platforms with established and very entrenched alternatives, like wmp and itunes, is basically a sign of desperation for a company without a real business plan. Especially when their product is actually worse, less intuitive, and provides absolutely not much in terms of value proposition for users to switch to it.
Pity. And yet I am fascinated by the fact that they actually managed to get funding at some point.
Edited 2010-04-03 20:55 UTC
three things are certain in life, death, taxes and software bloat.
Amarok 1.x was pretty good, but then they went and ruined it in 2.x and haven’t made it any better since. JuK is pretty bare bones, but does what I need (play music and show me a list of it and a few extra goodies). Of course, I’m one of those people who is satisfied with MOC or even just mplayer, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.
Edited 2010-04-03 20:58 UTC
Actually, the newer versions of amarok have gotten a bit better again – you can turn it back into a two-pane program if you so desire. (I do.)
As an example, it looks like this on my workstation:
http://nebdal.net/images/amarok.png
That’s 2.2.0 – I haven’t tried 2.3.0 yet.
Edited 2010-04-03 23:06 UTC
Wow, I know design is a personal thing but to me that looks really ugly and complicated. Everything looks smudged together and I wouldn’t know where to begin in that interface. But that’s the feeling I always get in any KDE version so it is probably me.
This is just my personal opinion, but I never liked the Amarok concept (that includes 1.4).
It’s how Amarok handles playlists. When I just want to play a single album, then in the treeview on the (by default) left side I have to right-click and select “Replace Playist”. The same when I want to play the whole collection.
Juk, Songbird, and iTunes are more what I like: A simple left-click on the left side replaces the view on the right.
I feel 100% the same. For that reason I use KDE’s Juk. If you run other KDE apps as well, it’s light.
Its startup speed is not the greatest, because Juk does not use a proper database for storing songs and playlists (hopefully a programmer reads this and implements a real database based on Nepomuk or whatever).
But I usually only execute Juk once per day and leave it running.
I feel exactly the same, so I wrote a little music player called Hum to scratch my itch. It uses the same amount of memory, no matter how much music you have, because it piggybacks on top of Tracker for search.
It’s young, it’s simple, and it needs more love to clean up the UI and make all the menus and buttons work as they should, but it’s already a mainstay on my wife’s netbook…
http://monodeldiablo.github.com/hum/
As an aside, Tracker is possibly the coolest part of the Linux desktop that nobody talks about. As soon as it gets write-back support for file metadata, most programs become almost trivial to write.
I feel exactly the same, so I wrote a little music player called Hum to scratch my itch. It uses the same amount of memory, no matter how much music you have, because it piggybacks on top of Tracker for search.
Sounds like a pretty damn good idea. You get to just write the UI and leave for others to find the files. The UI is plain hideous, but that should be fairly easy to fix. Do keep working on it, I see some great potential there
Have you tried it? The UI is actually a lot simpler (the search dialog is dynamic, so it slides down only if there are search results) than it appears.
If you have some constructive criticism, I’d love to hear it… “plain hideous”, while cute, is hardly helpful. What, specifically, don’t you like?
edit: I copied most of the UI from Rhythmbox, but stripped out the crap I didn’t need. If the image is cluttered, blame big fonts (I have terrible eyesight) and poor screen resolution (netbook). An alternate image of the UI — sans search results pane — is here: http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/2883/huminaction.png
Also, I do accept bugs reports.
Edited 2010-04-04 01:58 UTC
Have you tried it? The UI is actually a lot simpler (the search dialog is dynamic, so it slides down only if there are search results) than it appears.
If you have some constructive criticism, I’d love to hear it… “plain hideous”, while cute, is hardly helpful. What, specifically, don’t you like?
No, I haven’t tried it as I don’t use Beagle nor Tracker. I have no need to search for my files as I know where they are.
Anyways, as these are all just matters of taste people most likely will disagree with me, atleast some: do you really need a menubar in addition to button bar? It duplicates functionality and really brings nothing to the table you can’t achieve just by clicking the buttons. Simple way to fix this could be adding a button on the right — separate from the player controls — that by clicking on it would drop down a menu with “Preferences”, “About”, and if you come up with something important to add there.
I personally like to rate my songs and I know many who also do, so adding a 5-star rating system on either side of the time-elapsed-slider would be nice, especially since it feels the slider wastes screen space quite a lot. (Does it really have to be 100% of the window width?)
“No, I haven’t tried it as I don’t use Beagle nor Tracker. I have no need to search for my files as I know where they are.”
You should try them out, then, because you misunderstand their purpose. They don’t just track the location of your files, but also the metadata and content of your files. That means that you can enter the artist, album, track title, genre, or any other metadata field into Hum’s search bar and it’ll list any matching media.
It’s pretty sweet, and it’s desktop-wide. A classic example of simple, reusable code.
“do you really need a menubar in addition to button bar? It duplicates functionality and really brings nothing to the table you can’t achieve just by clicking the buttons. Simple way to fix this could be adding a button on the right — separate from the player controls — that by clicking on it would drop down a menu with “Preferences”, “About”, and if you come up with something important to add there.”
Personally, I’m right there with you. I almost never use the menu bar. In fact, I usually use hotkeys wherever possible. My wife, though, is totally different, and prefers the menu bar in most applications (she’s not a native English speaker, and a lot of the icons are cute plays on words in English, but ambiguous or meaningless in other languages). Also, I believe there are good accessibility reasons for having more than one way to perform an action.
“I personally like to rate my songs and I know many who also do, so adding a 5-star rating system on either side of the time-elapsed-slider would be nice, especially since it feels the slider wastes screen space quite a lot. (Does it really have to be 100% of the window width?)”
I plan on integrating ratings support in the near future. I like your idea of sticking the ratings somewhere readily accessible, though. I had planned to stick it in the properties popup for a given song (a la Rhythmbox), but that’s a lot of clicks to say that you like a song.
Yeah, same here. I mean, it’s supposed to be an AUDIO player that means it usually runs in the background and I won’t see any of it while working on other things. I only listen to music on my computer when actually working on something or surfing the web. For anything else there are portable music players and a decent stereo.
Well, ever since Spotify has emerged I rarely ever touch my 150GBs of MP3s (if it really happens that I listen to my MP3s, I just run mplayer from a terminal, that’s just enough
). It’s neat and fast and just does one thing, playing music. And it runs absolutely smoothly on wine and I even pay the 10 bucks per month for the premium account. And there are even open source clients available which use libspotify.
So, seriously. This story with Songbird is a bit sad, but I never used it anyway. It was just way too bloated and AFAIK never made it into any package repository of the Linux distros. The problem with Songbird was that it uses a heavily modified libxulrunner with only a few patches making their way back upstream. I don’t think it would ever have made it into Debian or Fedora unless they would have fixed that.
Adrian
If running proprietary software is not against your religion, I’d recommend trying to get MediaMonkey up and running with Wine. Mind you, I hate ALL of the music/media manager apps I’ve ever tried, but I can actually, almost tolerate MM. It is one of those apps that have kept many users from switching to Linux.
I find this a little disappointing. However Songbird never ran well on Linux with features broken / missing or late (In my experience of using it on Ubuntu).
Rhythmbox is much better. Even using Foobar2000 under wine seems to produce much better results.
Despiting the fact Songbird is quite overloaded with options [which also makes it quite heavy] I suppose it’s a minor loss for the open source OS audience, but it isn’t understandable movement in the same time.
Why dumping it? can’t they just pass it to the community?
I might be somewhat misinformed but I thought Songbird was an OSS project anyway
That’s what they did. They just announced that official corporate support for Linux ends.
Edited 2010-04-03 21:19 UTC
Actually, for those interested, we are launching a community branch (which we are currently referring to as Lyrebird).
You can find out more on Mozilla’s IRC at #Lyrebird
This is a bit shocking to me … ! I Though Songbird was a totally opensource project and then dropping Linux, WTF ?!
POTI (the company behind Songbird) are not dropping Linux. They drop the support. It’s a tiny but important difference.
They continue to build it for Linux and make sure it kinda works, but they no longer treat Linux as a priority 1 platform. No Linux-specific bug will be a release blocker. No corporate resources will be spend to fix Linux-specific bugs that don’t hinder Songbird development (as they wrote in the original announcement: Songbird is partially developed on Linux, therefore it needs to work at least somewhat on Linux).
If the Linux-using Songbird developers also use the player for private music listening, they surely don’t want a piece of trash and likely fix some bugs in their free time.
External developers are also allowed to contribute code: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Getting_Started/Cor…
As Songbird is a corporate FOSS product, they require contributors to assign the copyright which kinda sucks, but the agreement paper also ensures that the contribution will be open source so it levels out a bit (Sun/Oracle does the same with OpenOffice).
Video support really bugs me… Specially on apps like winamp, which are clearly music player software.
I enjoyed a bit Songbird on Linux, but it is too slow, it just feels bloated. Tried Amarok, JuK and Rhythmbox, never really liked them either. I just end up using audacious again on the end of the day.
Sorry for the bad english
Distro maintainers could still create packages. The fact that the Songbird team won’t release official Linux builds doesn’t mean that Songbird absolutely won’t build/run on Linux. It just means that it’s not supported by its original devs.
Edited 2010-04-03 23:13 UTC
Wrong.
The will use DirectX for video playback on Windows and Corevideo on Mac, which means that the Linux experience will be suboptimal or not comparable in terms of feature completeness.
Whether an audio player needs to play video is debatable. Dumb stupid move by people who think that the Linux community needs them more than they need the Linux community. I only advocated Songbird in my circle of friends so that when they moved to Linux it was just another program that they would already be used to. Amarok does already that and is a much better program.
It’s an open source project right? Which means that if the open source community wants they can make and send patches with XV/VDPAU/GL/Whatever support to make it work on Linux.
Then distros mantainers could opt to build and include in distros still, just like with any other software. Maybe the community should help more and be more comprehensive instead of being too whiny and demanding.
Edited 2010-04-04 08:13 UTC
Will they? I thought songbird were responsible for a huge amount of work in porting gstreamer to windows/mac, and therefore they would just use gstreamer to play video (which then may or may not then use the system libraries)
Never really cared for the program anyway. They sure as hell won’t be getting me as a user at all considering, well, now they’re blocking me out. Can’t say that I give a damn at all about this situation or anything else about the project.
They are not blocking you out, I think the code is still there. They are simply not working on it anymore, you are free to pick up where they left.
They’re dropping Linux support but keeping Mac support… WTF?! iTunes is kind of mandatory on Mac, You can’t sync your devices without it (not only iPod, AppleTV, iPhone and even Airport Extreme depends on iTunes).
So… Why the hell We’re going to use Songbird?! We can’t use it! OTOH Linux needs an advanced media player… Songbird has a big market there and they’re dropping it. Unexplainable.
No, it’s not. It’s only needed if you want to sync with iPods, iPhones or AppleTVs (and there are IHMO “workarounds” doing that without iTunes).
BTW syncing of adresses, notes, calendars is done via system wide SyncService. iTunes is most probably simply a SyncService client for those kind of data.
Airport Extremee does not depend on iTunes in any way. It’s the other way round: iTunes can use Airport Extreme for “AirTunes” streaming.
The real dependency of Mac users on iTunes comes from iLife / iWork, since those applications use iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, .. for easy media import.
And finally, there’s no need to point your finger to Mac users. You could have said the same thing about Windows and Media Player ..
Back on topic. I guess the magic word in the sentence is “support”. At first, that doesn’t sound so bad as dropping Linux altogether. However, Linux without support means that development of Linux specifics is seriously cut back since without support, no bug reports, no bugfixes and no user driven, platform specific improvements.
There is no workaround for using the iTunes store in Windows or OSX. Third-party syncing is also limited to transferable media. For you can’t auto-sync apps and movies that you bought on your iphone unless you use iTunes.
I find the the idea of an iTunes clone in Windows rather humorous since I don’t know anyone that would use it if they didn’t have an iphone or ipod. It feels clunky and looks out of place in Windows but even in OSX I find it annoying. A clone wouldn’t have the best features which are syncing and shopping.
Edited 2010-04-05 17:06 UTC
Good point. I *was* using it, because I could also use songbird on Linux and windows.
Pity – Oh well it was quite bloated but I liked it. It could dig out a lot of stuff about the band you were currently playing with the Mashtape plugin.
If people are looking for a cross platform music player the Java based aTunes isn’t bad and stands up quite well compared to Songbird.
Rhythmbox is better than I remember anyway after trying a quick play with it. I am about to uninstall Songbird. I might come back to to good Linux community fork of Songbird if one materializes.
So much for it becoming the OpenSolaris default media player.
as good as songbird is their are other perfectly good players. Amarok is my favorite, but SongBird was a close second.
Remember when xmms was THE media player for linux? or Zinf (freeamp)? good times.
Wish SongBird won’t be officially suported anymore.
Songbird?! That’s a little bleeding edge for me, I’m still in love with Amarok 1.4. So as long as I can still:
yaourt -S amarok1
I will live happy.
Removing it from all my computers now. I only use software that can be run on any of the three major oses. Plus, I’m not a fan of the code base.
You are not alone. This news was foreseeable. They stopped adding new features for Linux a long time ago. Ok the CD-Ripping Support is in the Dev-Tree but the Windows Version has a stable release.
I can recommend Exaile for users with a GTK based Window Manager.
Songbird is now gone. I deleted every trace from my linux machine.
Songbird still works on Linux. Don’t you read announcements? Only corporate support has ended. Linux code won’t be removed.
I imagine that stance is a bit tough to uphold (given that software usually only targets one or two of the platforms) and also a bit ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why you would do that. It’s completely arbitrary to pick Windows, Mac and Linux, when there are other OSes out there. And I assume you aren’t buying the software, so you aren’t even voting with your wallet. Complete waste of energy, if you ask me.
Not really, difficult or pointless. Its for my ease of use. I use all three platforms windows, linux mac daily. its much easier to have the same capabilities on each one for basic functionality: web browser, office documents, ssh, graphics work, ect. I did play around with the source a bit, but didn’t like the structure of a xulrunner app. So, I guess I was looking for a new media player anyways,
I can’t recall that I ever had a compelling urge to try Songbird. I have looked at some of the others– Amarok et al, but as my preference is for the GNOME desktop, I’ve generally been sticking with Rhythmbox. My demands aren’t enough to nitpick about Rhythmbox’s shortcomings, and as I’m also a bit of an audiophile snob, I have a pretty decent stereo/home theater setup for when I really want to listen to high quality music– most of my computing is at home, and there’s no drain on system resources that way.
If I had a strong want for a mobile music device, or did a lot more mobile computing, I might care more, but right now… I don’t.
Come on, Songbirdies, this can’t be real.
Alright Songbird! You want to give lot more options on the OS platforms where hell lot of players are already present! Good Luck with your decision.
I personally filed many bugs in Songbird under linux as it was quite buggy. Specially they had bad MTP support. If this project survives in Windows and Mac platform then it will be good! Else….
As far as linux goes.. I’ll say now I can simply focus on Banshee. I love Banshee and with Features provided by Songbird it had a fantastic chance to conquer on linux.
Edited 2010-04-04 12:11 UTC
As annoying as it is to see developers abandoning Linux as a platform, this doesn’t bother me too much. MoC is all I need for music.
I have to agree with Werecalf on this one. Linux doesn’t need Songbird. I prefer to use singular applications that are very well suited to a single task. For example, on my Sabayon system, I use Dragon for videos and Amarok for streaming music collections. For playing single mp3’s, I use Audacious. I don’t like huge, bloated applications that try to be all things to all users. Songbird is one such applications. It was based on Mozilla Firefox! In its quest to best Apple’s iTunes, Songbird tries too hard to do everything. The Jack of all trades is master of none. Songbird won’t be missed by the Linux community.
OK… so Songbird is losing Linux support. Fine.
Here’s my question: Why would Windows and Mac users want to use a less functional iTunes alternative over the real thing? FOSS fans? Well will there be any fans left after this FOSS shunning stunt?
For those who are interested, a few of us are working on a community branch. The name isn’t set yet, but we refer to it as lyrebird.
Those who are interested can visit #lyrebird on mozilla.org, or the forum at talksongbird.com, or forum.lyrebird.tk
And why don’t you just submit patches against Linux bugs to upstream Songbird? Why launch a fork?
POTI never said that won’t accept community contributions for Songbird on Linux.
Anyone know how to get a mashtape like option working in Rythmbox or Amarok? How about a decent shoutcast plugin for the current versions of Amarok or Rythmbox? Is there a way to do this without spending a whole afternoon compiling code? In Songbird all one had to do is add the shoutcast extention. Also browsing to shoutcast.com in Songbird on Linux allowed you to play anything on Shoutcast directly in Songbird very quickly. No having to add url to a playlist and such arcane steps of copying and pasting url from a browser. How do I do that in Amarok or Rythmbox. On Linux Songbird allow me to play music from any source in one application very very easily. As it is now without that I have to use Firefox then launch Totem to play shoutcast on Linux this is going back about 10 years. Songbird did all this in one App. No launching a bunch of external apps just to play music in different formats. This sux big time.
Didn’t you read the announcement? Songbird for Linux will be available. It will still be developed, because some of its programmers use Linux to develop Songbird.
Just corporate support ended. Songbird never had corporate support on FreeBSD, but it always ran there nonetheless.
run songbird
*win7 basic*
license agreement
*win7 aero* *win7 basic* x2
splash screen
*win7 aero* *win7 basic* x2
songbird starts
Stuck in win7 basic and that took 3 minutes on my quad core workstation!
There is nothing good about songbird on any platform I’ve tried. (windows/linux)
Back in the days when I had no Linux around, I was using Winamp. Then, digging into the sound engineering put me over to some other universes, but Amarok 1.4 has been and it is still my favorite. Why ? Because it suits my needs. So, I decided, out of curiosity, to check what the heck is that Songbird. In the first days it was kinda good, it had a lot of potential, but the latest versions are sooo much worse … So, no whining about them, they are going into wrong way.
No great loss, as they were by far one of the worst out there, the Windows world will eat them alive, just one more of a hundred competing for crumbs.