Songbird

[Cereb Daithi]

Anyone check this out yet? It actually looks pretty interesting. Imagine if winamp and firefox had a child.

http://www.songbirdnest.com/

[Sabre]

Interesting idea. Def. for all the music artists out there!

[avriette]

Colin pointed me at this, and I have to say that I really hate the software. Now, there's a caveat. The reason I don't like it is it won't natively do daap shares, and the only way to get to the oontz on my network is via daap. Well, to be fair, it will do daap, but only to pre-iTunes 8 hosts, and, well, I use whatever Apple tells me to, because I'm a bitch like that, and thus songbird doesn't grok my daap share. If I were using firefly (mt-daapd), it wouldn't be an issue.

Moving right along, the reason I figured I'd reply to this thread is to point out the hypemachine plugin. I don't have any idea how it works, other than you essentially post links to tracks on a webpage (e.g., a weblog), and songbird will "play" the page as a playlist. And so I can find things like http://www.discodelicious.com/ (yes, I'm a giant fag) and tell Songbird to JFDI. That is actually pretty cool, and it plugs seamlessly into last.fm, which is another bonus (last.fm will not run two instances of itself on one machine, and since this is a multi-user (as in, sandy and me) machine, I need to run at least two copies). I can also use it to play songs locally on the disk (which are in fact local and on the disk), but its memory usage and processing of XML (the .plist files) is just loathsome. Granted, it's gratis, but on a machine that's already running an instance of iTunes with a terabyte of stuff in it, telling Songbird to bust open its own process with its own hash of stuff in that same terabyte is asking for swap of death. And, happily, songbird plays DRM songs from Apple (yep, I buy those too!).

So, it's a mixed bag. The moral of the story: Songbird: the best HypeMachine client there is! (this is sort of like saying the iPhone is not a great phone, but is the best iPod yet!)

I just wish they were rolling nightly builds.

[chicken n waffles]

just say you don't like it ffs!!!

[avriette]

just say you don't like it ffs!!!

I don't like it ffs!!

But boy am I a sucker for nouveaux disco and electro. So, Hype Machine FTW, Songbird FTL.