I hope you like The Beatles! ;)
That’s it, I’m finally tired of iTunes. On my MacBookPro, it takes close to 3 minutes to cold start, and I see the spinning ball each time I click on its window. Such a pain! I needed to find a solution, quickly (well, I’m of those guys who don’t know how to live without music). I gently asked Google, then I discovered… Songbird!
Songbird Logo
It’s amazing, it really blew me away! First of all, it starts in less than 5 seconds! Incredible. Here is what it looked like, at my first start (right after it finished importing my 70GB iTunes library without an effort):
First start
No lag, everything is smooth. Let’s dig a bit more. In the menu bar, I found that:
Songbird strange window
What the… ? Well, a Firefox-like console in a music player? I thought it was an easter-egg. I closed it then I opened the preferences window, and I found…
This window looks familiar
A Firefox-like extension window! Wow, it looked like Songbird and Firefox are cut from the same cloth. But it’s not the end! I then discovered the built-in… browser!
It allows me to browse Songbird's extension list
And watch my beautiful weblog
And finally grab its characteristics
So, I have a Firefox/Gecko with a music player on top. It really came out of left field. What else? Remember, I left iTunes only because of its bad performances. Hopefully, Songbird has a lot of iTunes’ features:
Songbird iTunes like sidebar
Songbird coverflow-like (plugin needed)
Furthermore, I really prefer its miniplayer over iTunes’:
Songbird miniplayer
As you may have noticed, Songbird is, because of its Firefox foundation, highly customizable. So if you, like my, prefer a lighter skin, then just download it through the built-in browser! Here is the Gonzo 2.0 theme I chose:
Songbird Gonzo 2.0
So for me, slow and not customizable music players are all water under the bridge.
