Things I’m loving about Songbird’s release candidate

Songbird just popped out a 1.0 release candidate, a huge jump from the 0.7 release they’ve had on the site. Lotta talent behind this mozilla-based music player including some of the master crew behind the llama-ass-kicking winamp.

I’ve never been that big a fan of iTunes. I’ve always considered it a necessary evil because of needing podcasts seamlessly (downloading via rss in NetNewswire and related is never as smooth and integration with my iPod (particularly automatic syncing of podcasts), but fact of the matter is it’s at best a mediocre music player, lacks customization, and I really, really dislike the way everything gets pumped through the iTunes music store. Sure Apple has to monetize those song sales, but really. I never buy from them and after a while it annoys me.

On Linux, there’s been some interesting things going on, but really what I want out of my player is something that’s going to just simply play my music, help me enjoy it more, manage my podcasts and iPod, and probably most importantly, help me discover or find out about other music I might like.

Strangely, because I’d seen previous versions of Songbird, and while I’d liked it better than Amarok (which i think has a schizoid interface), I thought it was a little simplistic as a drop-in replacement.

I have to say though, I’ve just downloaded the 1.0 release candidate and it is really quite impressive. First and foremost the last.fm integration and music recommendation engine is actually well thought out, works well in the interface and is unobtrusive and fast. I learned new things about bands I’ve had in my library for years just tonight. Surprisingly, since I don’t go to many concerts, (mostly because I never find out about them in time), I really like the concert feature which lets me know when bands in my library may be having concerts near me in London (I’d love it if it alerted me when certain bands I’ve flagged are playing in London until I turned off an alert since usually my problem is never being able to know about tickets before they’re sold out), and really loving the lyrics feature which has already let me know how wrong I’ve been singing along to some songs I’ve had for years to.

To be honest, it could easily replace my iTunes on my desktop, though now I have to find a way to get the equivalent functionality I have in SizzlingKeys (or that I could get with QuickSilver, I’d love that too) so I can keyboard command the thing without moving off the keyboard. There really needs to be a OS integrated way to deal with manipulating at least the fast play/pause, fast forward/switch/back function from the keyboard and would love it if it had some sort of growl or equivalent integration (correction: just found a couple of growl integration add-ons here but none updated to the 1.0rc yet).

A few bugs I ran into but overall for a release candidate, a pretty damn solid version of the software to look at. Oh, and another nice thing, it manages my iTunes collection from Songbird meaning that I don’t even really have to switch at the moment.