Songbird=Mixed Bag

Well after talking with a friend about it and hearing about a new RC, I decided to try Songbird again.  They finally have Ipod support, something that had kept me from giving it more than a passing glance in the past,so I was excited.  That soon faded since I haven't had the opportunity to try that aspect yet.  Unfortunately, my experience hasn't been all that good.  It seemed to go fine testing it at work earlier yesterday, managing all of 2 albums on my computer there.  It played them, perhaps with some fuzz and other distortions here and there but overall, no major complaints.  I had heard that there were stability issues but I encountered none. I ran it all day without a hitch.

  But after coming home and turning it loose on my 180g remote-server-connected music collection the cracks really start to show.  I started it processing my collection before going to bed.  In the morning, it had finished and was thrashing my processor keeping it between 99-100%.  Being based on Firefox (as much as I love it) I'm not surprised to see that it was eating about half (512mb) of the available memory in the system and forcing other applications to a slow crawl.  Trying to actually play music was another exercise in futility, hangs and hick-ups every 30-50secs made it virtually unlistenable.

I really like the ideas and design/interface that fuels Songbird but damn, it needs an assload  of work before it's ready even for "beta" stage.  All bugs and glitches aside, I do take one issue.  I don't see where Songbird necessarily benefits from having a full web-browser built-in.  I can see where it's useful for, say navigating Odeo and then subscribing to podcasts (something that I assume is either a) in the works or b) already there and I'm just too dumb to find it) but I just don't think it's the best way to handle it.  I realize that at this point they need to just focus on having a useable player (there's still a lot of work to do in that regard) but when they go to add the spit and polish I would love to see a system that's more rss feed based with an interface that's more tailored for the Songbird experience than just another webbrowser that you have to worry about having plugins etc. for.  If you could type in an address and be presented with a list of feeds containing media off the site or...well....something else....I'm not sure exactly what.  I need to give this more thought but I'm kinda tired with the old idea of "Well we've got a new piece of software, let's cram a webbrowser in it".  To many bad memories of SonicStage....*shudder*....ugh....Not that Songbird is THAT bad, in fact being built on Firefox it would be surprising if it didn't have a browser...that being said, I really think that with RSS, and the seperation of content from presentation (a la CSS) that there should be new and exciting ways for users to interact with the same web content...it could be harvested and delivered in a way that is more customized to what a person is doing-- geared for music/media for example....

I need to give this more thought but I'm excited by the idea...

technorati tags:songbird, firefox, rss, css

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