Songbird Music Player

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » December 6th, 2005, 1:56 pm

Wow. It won't be properly open-source either. This is idiocy packed onto idiocy.

- Chris

Post by **BenBasson** » December 6th, 2005, 2:11 pm

Haha, really? If they're not going to make it open source, why build the entire interface in something inherently open (whether you like it or not)? Oddness.

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » December 6th, 2005, 2:44 pm

Y'know, how Netscape 6 worked.

Presumably it's written in XUL for free Web 2.0 Google juice.

- Chris

old np · Post by **old np** » December 6th, 2005, 3:22 pm

Reminds me of the Google Toolbar extension.

Post by **Jeff_pony** » January 9th, 2006, 11:46 am

The only thing missing for me in foobar is a volume control that's not under the options dialogue. Probably a way to do this with a plugin but im to lazy to research it. Also there seems to be some effort to port milkdrop as its open source now or something...

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lof ... 22648.html

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » January 14th, 2006, 10:40 am

Porting Milkdrop to foobar only reduces the incentive for people to never use foobar again though.

The only thing missing for me in foobar is a volume control that's not under the options dialogue.

Just look at this statement.

- Chris

Post by **BenBasson** » January 15th, 2006, 5:58 pm

Thumper wrote:Just look at this statement.

It only matters if you're not using the volume control on your speakers, which I am and I assume Jeff is (or was). I haven't touched a per-application volume control in the last four years.

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » January 16th, 2006, 5:05 am

The physical volume knob? A moving part? Goddess guard us. Please tell me that isn't the official explanation.

- Chris

Post by **BenBasson** » January 16th, 2006, 6:12 am

I'm just winding you up, I have no idea what the official justification is but it doesn't concern me one bit.

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » February 8th, 2006, 9:24 am

Songbird 0.1 (in true Web 2.0 manner, it's a "preview") has apparently been released. No point in linking to the site though, because despite having spent months hyping it and getting blogjuice someone neglected to ensure they could weather a bit of traffic.

- Chris

skyhopper88 · Post by **skyhopper88** » February 13th, 2006, 4:40 pm

The reasons I switched from Winamp 5 to Foobar was
1) Low mem usage
2) Extensibility
Foobar to me, is the Firefox of media players right now. But Songbird may trump it in those regards...eventually. I'll say right now I'm no fan of iTunes, the web integration, music store ties and what not are of no use to me. And right now Songbird is a RAM hog, at least for me (athlonxp 2ghz, 512 MB RAM). But in the future, when Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Songbird etc are all running on XULRunner, that won't matter as much when they all share a common base and they're running all at once. I don't even mind that it looks like a carbon copy of iTunes right now. With the Firefox theming and extension system, it could become exactly what I want in a media player just like FF has done for me for web browsing, moreso than Foobar can. It will take alot to pull me away from the foo side, but it may happen. I'm going to keep a close watch on this.

Post by **BenBasson** » February 13th, 2006, 4:49 pm

It'd be the Firefox of music players if it had about a billion less options.

Canyonero · Post by **Canyonero** » April 14th, 2006, 9:58 am

Thumper wrote:
Ditto visualisations.

You clearly haven't used Winamp enough lately. Milkdrop essentially obsoleted every other Windows music player, and is my primary reason for still using Winamp (lord knows freeform skins got boring when it was discovered there were only three good ones ever).

There are exactly two models for modern music players: the "playlist + visualisations" one (Winamp) and the "music library" one (iTunes). Given that Milkdrop is a shining, flawless jewel, and Winamp has essentially perfected the art of an appliance-style music player, the only possible improvments at this point are to the music library model. The first one would be a player which doesn't have some stupid third-party toolkit UI and doesn't have some misguided moral stance against ID3v2.

- Chris

Wow I'm posting in a old thread. Winamp has a music library. It has had for quite a while.

I think skinning music players is pretty much a necessity now. People want something small and useful. It should show them the name of the artist and album playing along with coverart if it can, and it has to have play, pause, stop, seek, prev, and nextfunctions readily available without taking up a whole lot of space. Titlebars with titles, min, max and close buttons, along with window borders are just wasted room. In fact, they sorta detract from the goal of the player, and force it to be an application, rather than an add-on to your system.

Post by **BenBasson** » April 14th, 2006, 12:20 pm

Canyonero wrote:Titlebars with titles, min, max and close buttons, along with window borders are just wasted room.

Wasted room until you want to actually do those things, you mean?

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » April 16th, 2006, 12:27 am

In fact, they sorta detract from the goal of the player, and force it to be an application, rather than an add-on to your system.

It is an application. This is the whole point of it being on your computer. If you want an appliance, use Winamp or an iPod. If you're using a music library-style app, you're doing so because you want computer-like control over the device. If your desktop's window manager is so intrusive as to interfere with this goal, your desktop is broken.

- Chris