Thomas Pelletier

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.