Bits and Dissertations

If you haven’t read one of my other 2 posts on Songbird then this is a good place to start. Songbird released their 1.0 a little while back and let me say that it is spectacular. If you have read some of my past posts about songbird you’ll remember that stability and performance were issues, and some standard features were missing. 1.0 not only takes care of almost all of those issues but I would now consider Songbird a real competitor in the media player world. The addons and feathers (skins) it provides are of good quality and performance is nothing less than what I would expect. Nonetheless they are missing a few necessary features: watch folders, CD ripping, and video playback. Watch folders and CD ripping along with many others will be available in April and video playback shouldn’t be far behind that.

The only complaints I’ve heard are the aforementioned features, and a slight similarity to iTunes in appearance. The last complaint can of course be remedied with feathers, and because it’s open source you can of course increase speed of development yourself by contributing to the project.

In my opinion Songbird is one of the most promising new technologies out there largely due to its aggressive development cycle and it’s open source and extendable nature, the same features that made Firefox the browsing giant that it is.