THEBRIX2008 This is a nice application. Although unwieldy (it is based on Mozilla, and scatters "Mozilla" folders around various places in ~/Library) it is fast to start up and fast in operation, performs large imports without choking (a 9,000-track iTunes library and 100 folders of FLAC files in my case) and, most importantly for me, handles classical music well; the Composer field is treated with equal importance to the others, accented characters keep their accents, and long fields are not truncated. For me Songbird's two big advantages over iTunes are that open formats (FLAC, OGG) are accepted and that rules and filtering are significantly better (Smart Playlists, in particular, completely trounce anything iTunes offers); some of the add-ons, such as a duplicate or dead track finder, a drag-and-drop play queue and a tagger much more powerful than the built-in tagger (which is more or less the same as that offered by iTunes) are very useful. I feel that the developers have done a fine job in copying iTunes where it is good (doing otherwise would have been a bad idea as iTunes has become the popular standard, for better or worse) and improving on it when it is not. The extensions potentially put Songbird far in advance of iTunes, and no doubt more will be released now that it has reached a production version.
(Version 1.0) | 
