Songbird is a free and open source audio player for all major operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is part of the Mozilla Foundation project and the current stable release is version 1.2.
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We finally urged to put Songbird under a series of tests for a review after informed that the latest version comes with equalizer, a sound enhancement we have been longing for in Songbird. The unavailability of the equalizer all this time is what makes most of us here reluctant to use itor even try it because we here love to manipulate sounds to suit our personal preferences.
Songbird was intended to be the world's first 'web player' which was said to be able to play web media seamlessly. This was made possible thanks for the utilization of Mozilla's XULRunner Platform which also contributes to the multi-platform nature of this software.
Songbird has been around since February 2006 and has been steadily developed and improved by the developer and contributor community. Many features has been added since then and the most recent and noticeable feature would be the inclusion of 10-band equalizer. This equalizer is not much but it is what user has been nagging and anticipating for more than 2 years. It is a pity that a sound enhancement feature like this was missing and been underestimated (ignored/overseen/undermined) by the developer when they first release the software.
Songbird, unlike its web browser siblings (Firefox, Flock, etc.) however fails to gain its own identity. From the beginning, it tries to mimic both Firefox and iTunes, and the UI and even the default 'Feathers' (skin) is very much resembles iTunes in most aspects (around 90% if we must say). This is probably because "Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players" (Aaron Boodman, Greasemonkey) as well as being as powerful as iTunes. Nice try they had there and they succeed to certain extent while most of the time they failed hard.
We must say Songbird tries to be as powerful as both Firefox and iTunes combined although in reality it is not as powerful as either of the software alone. To be another Firefox, it disables many of Firefox's capabilities despite adopting its entire codebase. To make it worse, the developer has announced that the browser extension is just a secondary (minor) feature and they won't take care much about it. What a waste when they can just make it to be a browser with media playing capability. On the other hand, to be an iTunes, Songbird did not include great features like the individual EQ settings for songs and there is not even a CD ripping/writing present. To make it worse, although there's an add-on for EQ presets (presets are unavailable by default) there is still no way to create your own. Luckily it supports more audio format than iTunes, particularly open source format like OGG and FLAC. Not to mention the skinning (Feathers) that makes iTunes looks lame.
We have a suggestion to Songbird developers. Instead of mimicking only Firefox and iTunes, they might have to look forward on Windows Media Player too. We know Songbird has built-in volume gain feature but it is not as powerful as WMP's "Quiet Mode" (sound limiter/filter). Perhaps they may try mimicking WMP in the next release? Even as a plain audio player, Songbird still does not match Winamp so as long as we still see both iTunes and Winamp as our favorite, Songbird won't last long in our software installation list. Thanks for trying Songbird.
We have tried and tested the software and it fails to replace iTunes, WMP and Winamp in our heart. We can't accept an excuse like "this is due to its immaturity" for this software has been in development for 2 and a half year already. Honestly, we found that Songbird is not as heavily polished as Firefox (talking about slower development here). We hope this will change soon because we here are long time (die hard) open source software supporter and we are looking forward towards the next release. We would like to have an open source media player that can rival head to head with those old timer.
Download Songbird for free here:
http://getsongbird.com/
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