Rating and comments for Songbird

Very nice program, crashes sometimes tho.

Seems to have potential but a lot of work will need to be done. It's currently very buggy. I'm not sure I understand why it was built on the Gecko engine since a web browser doesn't seem to make a good music library.

Wow.. I like it already. The website looks nice, all the features are in the right place. Combined with the platforms it supports, this is going to be my alternative to iTunes. Finally I can use the same player in Ubuntu as well in Windows.
It is still buggy though, so can't wait for 1.0 to be released.

This program is growing everyday to become a real iTunes drop-in replacement. I was really surprised when I downloaded their latest nightly (2-22-2007) and saw how fast, improved, and much better it had become.

For the newcomer, Songbird has an interface closely to iTunes', and has the plus of being open source and having an active community around it. Watch for this program to mature, and you'll love it.

If you want to see what this player is capable of without having to install it, you can go to their website and watch a brief video screencap showing the basic features, as well as some peculiar ones. You'll like it, I promise ;-)

A good concept, but at this stage, it is slow and crashes too much. Interface is a bit complex too.

Great music player but not yet ready to be a main music player yet.

i have been following it since it was started, and it has come a long way, it's not yet ready to replace iTunes but by the end of 2007 ill be switching,

Show very good potential.. Love using a real open source alternative to iTunes..

The design is very sleek. With downloadable skins, it makes customizing to your own liking a synch. It's definitely going to top Itunes soon :)

seems to be very clunky and poor to use with regular crashes on all os's. However i was a big fan of it when it initally was released.

It does use quite alot of resources so if you have them to spare its a fun ride!

Seriously limited due to lack of a good "Now Playing" or "Queued Songs" functionality that is common in many other media players.

User must select songs one by one and click a menu to add them to the play list that you must create first. Double clicking a song starts playing it in some "invisible playlist" and overall usability is very confusing.

Sorry songbird, but you missed some of the most basic features of a media player.

there are still some features I'd like to see (such as a built in ripper/converter) but version .6 looks good and performs decently well.

I dislike the browser feature. Makes it all bloated. I understand that it's based on the Gecko Engine but still I don't want a web browser within a media player. The plug-in section seems to grow steadily, that's ok. The skins currently available vary from dark to ugly - so not much choice here.
However, Songbird fails - for me - at what it should be: A media player and library. It's slow. It eats ram (at the moment 180 MegaBytes!!). Sometimes it freezes for half a minute if I want to look up something in the media library although I don't think that 14000 tracks is that much. A media player should be able to manage this!
Songbird does not read my mp3's tags correctly: It always misses the artist tag. That's annoying.
Sometimes Songbird starts consuming all my processor power. When a new song starts cpu usage usually goes up to 80% for 4 - 5 seconds.

and so on...

I can not recommend it at all. I will try musikCube now. If this does not do the job I'll return to Windows Media Player :(