Songbird is a new Music player that's been out for a while. I heard a lot about it, and gave it a test drive today. You can download the latest version here. Below are some screen shots and my thoughts on this application.

The opening screen clearly looks attractive and I've always liked grayish black themes. It looks a lot like Apple's iTunes with a black skin.

There is an alternative red skin available as well. No other skins or extensions are out at the moment, but I'm sure they are well underway. This is still new product after all.

Quote from the Welcome Screen:

"Songbird is a media browser and Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

This is a preview release, a proof-of-concept, so there are many things still missing. We will have a full-featured version this summer."

The familiar options screen confirmed the Firefox browser engine.

Songbird is a full fledged browser and nicely integrates several other services. You can search Google, Yahoo and Creative Commons for audio files right within the interface. You can also find Odeo and Podemus podcasts, listen to Shoutcast and Radiotimes.

[Ad: Aamzon Search in Browser]

The downside of Songbird is the insanely high RAM usage, an effect of using a firefox engine. A glance at the screen shot below will show that Firefox isn't too resource friendly either, despite its great functions. Even when idle, Songbird used around 22 MB and when playing, that shot up to 32 MB. In Firefox style, it kept rising to 58 MB and stayed stable around there.

Songbird's RAM usage on standby.

Songbird RAM usage when playing.

Songbird's RAM usage after a while.

From the Songbird Web site:

" Recommended system requirements

* 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or comparable
* 256MB RAM (512MB for WinXP)
* 30MB Hard Disk Space
* 32bit Sound Card
* Windows 2000, Windows XP
* 8x speed or greater CD Burner (Required for Burning)
* 16x speed or greater CDROM (Required for Ripping)

Performance requirements will scale to the size of the user's library. "

I normally use foobar2000 and 1by1 for my music players, so such figures are clearly unacceptable to me. The typical music listener is probably not going to care though and I can imagine that most fully features media jukeboxes like iTunes and Windows Media Player 10 also consume quite a bit of resources. Comparing Songbird against foobar2000 is probably unfair since foobar2000 is more of a audiophile's and professional's tool and is not aimed at user friendliness. Songbird also offers an excellent and tested web browser within, something that no other music player has to date.

Features

Songbird offers many features of all in one music jukeboxes. This includes ability to burn CDs, buy music online, maintain a library of the music collection, listen to podcasts, radio etc. Songbird should aim to have a last.fm plugin and probably include Pandora among the streaming music options. An ability to minimize to tray is also needed and most current music players seem to have that.

Songbird versus Firefox

This is question some might have and I can confirm that Songbird is much more than just Firefox with Foxytunes or other music extensions. Despite the similarity between the two, Songbird's main goal is being a good music player, not a Web Browser. In fact, I would guess Songbird can probably replace Firefox in the future but not the other way around. Songbird bears all of Firefox's features including extensions and bookmarks. Tabbed browsing is currently missing, but should be included in the final release. Firefox and Mozilla extensions might probably be compatible with Songbird as well, though I have not tried this myself yet.

Profit model

Expect Songbird to follow Mozilla and Flock on this matter. By offering ability to buy from Music Stores like CD Baby, MP3 Tunes and other services within the interface, they probably hope to earn some sort of revenue. The web is clearly important in obtaining and listening to music these days. And recently, web services like last.fm are also being used to track listening preferences.

Songbird's market will probably overlap with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Player and other such players. And within that market, I can already tell that its the best. It allows compatibility with several MP3 players including iPod. I expect those who are frustrated using iTunes to transfer their iPod collection will switch to Songbird. That's quite a lot of people judging from my own circle of audio enthusiasts, most of whom have resorted to YamiPod and other tools.

The Bottom Line

Songbird's biggest advantage is the fact that its open source and supports every operating system unlike its rivals. Being open source makes it easier to write extensions and add-ons. As we have seen, within two years of its release, Firefox has far more extensions than any other browser on the market. Songbird has already performed well for a preview release. I don't think I will move away from foobar2000 for my primary music player since its advanced features and low resource abilities can't really be matched. But, several others will switch to Songbird with the final release, unless they have already done so.