With the new 0.2 developer release of Songbird I thought, being a lover of open source, and free programs I'd give it a whirl. Starting off the 15.3 Mb download was reasonable. Only took about one minute on my 8 Mb connection.

As soon as that was done, the dmg package released itself, and I get a really nice window displaying the songbird package contents. Simply the Songbird icon, and the application link. Dragging the songbird icon over the app link! Hey presto! So far so good. The egg idea is really smart, suppose the egg will hatch on version 1?

From Various pics ...

Next up running the program. As with Firefox, thunderbird and Sunbird. Songbird will bounce the icon in the dock, disappear then come back a few second later. Kinda of used to this action now, but when I first saw it happening with Thunderbird I thought something could possibly be wrong.

Next a window appears that I agree to the terms, yes I do. About a minute later the main window appears, with a message to find my audio files. Okay, now I select my music folder, and click watch folder for changes! Wow! I've been looking for this feature in iTunes for ages (I know it can be done with applescript, but haven't figured it out yet). As you can see from my earlier posts my music is from Emusic. Meaning for every tune, I have to drop them inside Itunes. This can be such a pain! Okay, things are looking good for songbird. I wait a couple of minutes more while songbird scans all my media, then takes me to the main window. Okay, now I'm thinking things are a bit slow, but I'll keep hanging on, maybe this is just the configuration process. Finishing that, I click on an mp3 file, it starts playing! Cool! <joke> Within a second playback is briefly interrupted while songbird seems to calculate the time on the file, and I hear my hard disc creek slightly. Playing around a little more, finds songbird averaging around 60%, and for those little stops music, it can hit over 100%, highest I've seen is %104!

From Various pics ...

Now this may not effect everyone, I'm running a rather old PowerMac G4 733 with 1152MB of memory. Okay, this machine is five years old now! Still I'd expect future editions to be a bit faster, and for songbird to be able to at least play an mp3! Other than the performance issues, it really is an excellent player. I love the ability to surf the net, and songbird will automatically make a list of playable songs on that particular webpage. I've haven't tried the emusic integration yet, because the aforementioned issues.

Now back to iTunes, & Cog for playing my tunes for the moment. If the speed increases I'll be back, maybe I was a little harsh for a 0.2 release.