MIGUEL  I really wanted to give this app a chance. I tried about 2 years ago and thought, hey it's early to pass judgement, lets hope it keeps getting better. So fast forward two years later, I launch the app, the default GUI theme looks cheesy unmac-like and worse than the one years ago. The store is buggy: after leaving it, songbird got stuck on previewing a song. There is no way to import a CD?

I downloaded songbird because I thought that being open source it would have the awesome LAME encoder which iTunes doesn't have. But guess what? 4 years in development and no CD importing, no LAME encoder!?

The program remains buggy, the browser-based GUI is just wrong. Just because we can put a browser inside doesn't mean the GUI needs to be based on it.

To be fair, I liked the integrated lyrics feature, the itunes-like browse feature, the quicktime playback for fairplay.

But overall I'm not sure what to make of it. Lack of CD importing alone should make this a 0.5 app, not a 1.4.3 app.  
(Version 1.4.3)

MONKEYJUNKEY  ATM Album-Art isn't imported for AAC-Files. This makes it really hard to move on from iTunes. My iTunes library is about 50% AAC und 50% MP3. Hoping on an update...  
(Version 1.2)

YOSHINATSU  Songbird is a really good piece of software, and it REALLY could have the potential of being "the Firefox of audio players".

Taking features from iTunes, Winamp and implementing new innovative ones, along with the use of add-ons, Songbird could have that "something" we all have wanted since the beginning of the MP3 era.

The Mac OS X port could have been more native though.

Songbird needs to implement the philosophy of Firefox 3 to achieve something on Mac OS X.  
(Version 1.1.2)

GLOBETROTTERDK  There is now a PPC (community) version of Songbird. You can find it here:

http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/contrib/Songbird_0.7.0_20080902_macosx-ppc.dmg  
(Version 1.0)

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)

JAZZYGUY  Still no update for PPC users. I have 2Macs that are intel and 4 Macs that are PPC . I have Songbird on all of them as well as their associated exernal back up hard drives. I feel that there are many others like me who would appreciate the updated version on their PPC Macs but apparently the developers of Songbird vchoose to ignore our requests.  
(Version 1.0)

GREGMLR  They can support XP but not Tiger in the new version? Fabulous!  
(Version 0.7)

NADAMAC  a quantum leap from version 0.6!

finally usable.

wow!  
(Version 0.7)

JAZZYGUY  No PPC!!!! Incredible that we are being ignored!  
(Version 0.7)

LEGAL EAGLE  Write in whatever language you happen to speak.

Not everyone on the planet speaks English. In fact the overwhelming majority of the world's population does NOT speak English.  
(Version 0.6.1)