Trying out Songbird
2nd March 2009
It’s amazing what can be done with a code base: the Gecko core of Firefox has been morphed into a music player called Songbird. On my Ubuntu machine, Rhythmbox has been my audio player of choice, yet the newcomer could be set to replace it. There might have been other things going on my system, but Rhythmbox playback was becoming jumpy and that allowed me a free hand to look at an alternative.
A trip to the Ubuntu repositories using Synaptic was all that was required to get Songbird installed. I suspect that I could have gone for an independent installation but the one that was available through the official channel sufficed for me. It found every piece of music in the relevant folder, even those that it was unable to play because of iTunes DRM and it was easy to set it such that it simply moved on when it met such a file rather than issuing a dialogue box to complain. That means that I weed out the incompatible entries in the course of time rather than having to do it straight away. I cannot claim to be an audiophile, but the quality of the playback seems more than acceptable to me and there seem to be no jumps so long as a file hasn’t been corrupted in any way. All in all, Rhythmbox could get usurped.
Sorry but Amarok is better than Rhythmbox….by a mile or so.
Songbird is not bad though.
Amarok 9/10
Songbird 8/10
Rhythmbox 7/10