A Little About Songbird:
Songbird is an open source multi platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) extensible multimedia player that has support for limitless amounts of customization. Songbird has been touted in multiple other reviews as the "Firefox of Music Players" and a "Itunes Killer." There is Codec support for the most common filetypes like: MP3, Vorbis, and even lossless FLAC on all platforms; depending on which platform you're using, even more codecs are available standard. A really neat feature of Songbird is its integration with media services like Shoutcast, Last.fm, and 7digital, as well as extensions to support Twitter, Youtube, and a host of other Media and news sources.
Getting Started:
To get started just go to GetSongbird.com and get the installer for your platform. Installation is quick and painless and is followed by a wizard to set up features and import media. After getting Songbird installed, and some media added, the first thing you will probably want to do is get some add-ons that will help with organizing your collection and provide some additional functionality.
1.) Feathers (Skins) - I grabbed a couple dark themes to make Songbird fit right in with my OS.
2.) The Exorcist - The Exorcist is a tool that shows Duplicate/Missing files in your library. Very convenient for when your building your media library.
3.) Now Playing List - A panel that adds a now playing list to your Songbird display. It's customizable in that it allows you to choose how the media will be added and allows you to easily make playlists. This seems like a add-on that will very likely become standard in some future version.
4.) LyricMaster - This add-on automatically fetches lyrics for your songs based on their meta data. The speed and ease it does this is absolutely amazing. If lyrics can't be found, which I found rare, it gives the option to perform a Websearch for them. My only gripe with this add-on is that, to my knowledge, you can't make it automatically scan and add lyrics to your entire library, but rather does it as soon as one plays a song.
*Although I'm not sure if this affects all platforms or even all hardware, but I had to download this add-on to enable the Multimedia keys on my keyboard.
My Impressions:
I find Songbird very easy to use and very functional with minimal configuration and everything worked as expected. Everything is well laid out and they manage to pack a lot of information into the available screen real-estate without it being cluttered, like the library, relevant band information, now playing list, and navigation. The Metadata editor was good allowing quick and easy tag changes, as well as multiple tag at once editing which is very useful when adding albums, and lots of untagged media. The ability to monitor folders(Preferences>>Media Importer>>Watch Folder) is always useful, although I found it a little hard to find as searches turned up questions from previous revisions that didn't have this feature. The only problem I found with Songbird, which was minor, is the ability to remove an item from the hard drive as well as just the library, a feature that is very handy for re-organizing and managing your library. Searches turned up official requests for this feature and it will be added in future versions, but due to more pressing issues hasn't made it in just yet. Overall this is a fantastic piece of software that really gives Ubuntu a visually appealing, and very functional media playing alternative to Amarok and Rhythmbox.
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