Songbird 0.6

Posted: June 24th, 2008 | Filed under: Software | Tags: , ,

This little guy was quite impressive. It has a really slick looking and easy to use UI. It only took me a couple seconds to learn how to get around, probably because it looks VERY similar to another media player.. itunes anyone? Although it looks a lot better then itunes, it needs to be changed.

There is a second set of “feathers” for the player that allow you to minimize it to very small player. Songbird refers to its skins as feathers. This tiny player is very usefull especially because unlike winamp the mini player stays on top of all other windows by default.

A very usefull feature, that is not to common, is the “Jump to” feature. This is a simple search feature that allows you to start searching for the title of a song, or name of a band, and as you type it returns matches. An excellent way to find the song you are looking for, as long as you remember its name and how to spell it.

Songbird also has Firefox build in, Its very appearant when updating, installing addons, or even when browsing in it, go figure. Maybe thats why it uses such a rediculous amount of system resources (65k+) it does however help when getting addons for songbird, because you never have to leave the program.

Another great feature is the built in music stations and mp3 search engine (But I see some legal problems eventually happening with that). The music stations allow you to set up favorites so you can quickly find the ones you like.

Songbird Media Player

My Suggestions:
Fix the system resource problem. 65k+ is rediculous for a media player. Thats 6 times as much as musikcube and 4 times as much as Windows media player. Songbird should merge with Miro as one all around media package, That would really be something to look forward to.

My rating: 9/10

Summary:
- Good clean and simple UI but way to much like itunes
- Great miniplayer
- Excellent Jump to Feature
- Firefox built in
- Resource hog
- Just released version 0.6 as I was writting this
- Lots of easy to access addons

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