Songbird, the highly anticipated open-source media player from Rob Lord and the gang, built on the same platform as Firefox, was released today as a "proof of concept". The official site was impossible to access, but I managed to download the installation file from a mirror.
Songbird crashed the first time I opened it, and the second time, and the third time. I uninstalled and reinstalled, but this pattern continued. Eventually, I learned the secret. If I let it hang for about five minutes in the task bar, she'd perk up and actually open. As frustrating as this was, I knew it was merely a proof of concept and I wanted to give this open source iTunes killer a whirl.
Songbird looks cool, all decked out in a mettalic black. It also looks a lot like iTunes, which is a good thing. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I excitedly added my music folder to my new Songbird library. This was a mistake. 1141 complete albums and 17,024 MP3s was a lot for this preview release to digest and while using over 90% of my CPU it spent the next hour digesting this grandiose meal until I finally pulled the plug. Oink oink, baby.
With about 15% of my collection indexed, I started shuffling, making playlists and giving it a thorough test drive. Not bad... The concept has been effectivey proven. With the bugs ironed out, especially that damn xulrunner.exe error I kept getting, and a diet, because right now it's a bloated resource hog, I see great potential.
I'm looking forward to the next release. Until then, it's back to the proprietary and evil iTunes.
