Songbird for Mac2.2.0

NOTE: Songbird phones home to Google Analytics. IOW: It's tracking user behavior. Be Aware! Reverse firewalls, such as Little Snitch and Intego's NetBarrier can stop such tracking.

If anyone has a copy of Songbird 0.6.1 (PPC) available, please let me know ASAP...it was previously available at http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/macosx/ppc/Songbird_0.6.1_macosx-ppc.dmg Many thanks!

End of the road for Songbird: http://blog.songbirdnest.com/you-gotta-know-when-to-fold-em/

Rather than convert an extensive library of flacs and shn to alac (for iTunes), I've been trying to use Songbird, with some frustration. I have over 25k items in my library and always growing. Songbird is slow to respond to just about everything in 10.7.5. This may have to do with the media server, which I prefer to disable but can't seem to figure out how. Maybe the idea is that everyone wants to be web integrated instead of just using a feature rich player. Songbird tells me it can't find the shn decoder and for more information, click here. Nice feature, but it takes me to a *video* codec page and ya know, I can't find the shn decoder for SB either. I also had trouble moving the window; disabled various add-ons and messed with prefs and the resize buttons appeared and the window problem was solved. Basically I think the features are very good, lots of integration even though that's not my interest. No cover flow. With tons of customized album art I've spent years collecting and attaching to files, that's a sticking point for me. No ability to see what format the track is; iTunes can list by "kind." But really the speed is the deal breaker. Slow to start, slow to quit. But most frustrating is the one second wait while "chrome and ip address" show up just to switch playlists. Although in prefs one can block sites from accessing your library, I'm just not into my player constantly connecting to the internet for various reasons. I just want to hear my music. Can't beat the price, and for that I really salute you, SB developers. So, I'm headed back to my regular flow of converting flacs and shns to alacs in Toast or Fission. Maybe we can date again in the future, Songbird.

Terrible Icon. This app gets worse and worse....WORSER???? It doesn't like to quit . I had to force quit it 4 times. Ugly icon I used the one that Negritude suggested in last version.

2.1 appears to be released: http://blog.songbirdnest.com/songbird-classic-version-2-1-update/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+songbird-blog+%28Songbird+Blog%29

With the icon courtesy of Negritude I really like version 2.0. It seems a little faster and snappier in Mountain Lion 10.8.1

I just upgraded to 2.0.0 and am now unable to move the window. Since half the window is off-screen, the program is now useless.

A massive change and not for the better. Open window/player could not be moved. Cloud site requires login with Facebook, why? Deleted and with no intention of installing again.

Should be called iTunes lite. Didn't like it.

New icon is incredibly ugly, and I highly doubt it follows Mac OS X's icon guidelines. Just because Adobe is dumb and introduced this style of icons doesn't mean it's good.

It is mentioned that the improvements including the ability to play wma files, yet I am not able to. Any help on this?

simply love it! great features, nice interface, can be customized with plug ins, can be synced with external devices and has watch folders option! what else do you wish for? forget to mention that is free.

GOOD!

I have spent the last 24 hours attempting to talk to the developers about repairing their broken URL. I can't download the software. I've extremely clearly described the problem to them and received back only WRONG information. The problem is at their end. It throws those attempting to download the software, via their OWN 'Free Download' link on their website, to an XML error page. This occurs on ALL BROWSERS (meaning the everything except Opera and obscure browsers rarely used by anyone). I'm FED UP trying to help them and GIVE UP trying to make sense to them. I am deleting this software from my Macs. I don't respond well to talking to a wall. I tried!

The icon is cool, but the program LAGGS like hell also hotkeys on the keyboard (preferbaly the default iTunes ones) would be awesome. right now it just can't compete, who knows in the near future it might hold a chance

Thought I'd give it a try. Just installed and imported 303GB of music from iTunes. It's very sluggish and when I launched it the second time, I just got the spinning beach ball "not responding" and had to force quite. It also didn't import my folders....only the playlists. In to the trash it goes....back to iTunes with no problems.

Like some of the others I want to like Songbird. The one thing that is really holding me back is how it CANNOT integrate the 'play/pause','backward','forward' on the Mac slim keyboard. If anyone has ever dabbled in Linux Songbird very much resembles some of the free music playing apps they offer. I didn't read into the literature but am pretty sure this is a port from linux. This is an app worth trying.

Great looking feature set but it crashes after less than a minute on my 2010 Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. If I click on anything after initially starting a ShoutCast stream, it crashes immediately; If I don't click on anything after starting a stream it crashes within about 30 seconds.

FYI, you can always find unofficial PPC builds here: http://the-eleven.com/tlegg/files/songbird/

IF you have a couple hundred gigabytes of music on a server on your network and want something that will let you add them to your library and play them before global warming cooks the planet, you want Songbird. IF you have high quality audio files and want decent quality output, you want Songbird. If you want either of these things, iTunes just simply sucks. It's DRM-laden crapware, slow as hell, bloated, and sounds bad. iTunes is only good for downloading podcasts and syncing ipods. For everything else, use Songbird.

Eating up a lot of RAM. Crashes all the time. I'll keep iTunes which only takes like 50MB of RAM.

Mh, is there no way to manage my podcasts? I know, running joke since ‘08: "1.9.2 Release Notes - Songbird Wiki 19 Jan 2011 - The following are not yet supported by Songbird (will be planned for future releases): Podcast Subscriptions and Playback, CD Burn [...]"

FOOBAR is NOW available in Binary form for OSX!!!! Whoppeee!!! It includes WINE and works great!!!! It is available at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=77261&hl= Enjoy!!!!

VERY SLOW!!!!

All I can say is Phew! A terribly bad application! Slow beyond words.

Application not responding On first launch. I have to give up with this software now, its like a container ship.

The biggest deal breaker for me is the shear amount of RAM this thing chews up. I mean I though iTunes was bad but jesus...

Are there plans to release a version that does not crash all the time?

The latest unofficial PPC build: http://the-eleven.com/tlegg/files/songbird/Songbird_1.9.0a-0_macosx-ppc.dmg

New versions' performances are definitely better, so finally I could try it: Songbird's features are very interesting, but also too much plug-in oriented. The User Interface and the usability break any good mac os x experience I'm used to: and this is the main reason for me to not use Songbird..

Here is the link for Foobar2000 for installing on the Mac. It only works for Intel Processors so consequently I will install Foobar2000 on my MacBookPro and my MabookAir. http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/427992/simple-way-to-run-foobar2000-on-mac

Many users have switched to Foobar using Wine. I think it is a good idea. Anyone interested can Google Foobar and the instructions to get it on your Mac are in the list of items in Google. It is certainly worth a try since the Developers don't give a ding dang about your opinions and do whatever is expedient for them. First they dropped support for PPC Mac users while allowing Linux users to install now thev dropping of Shoutcast without a warning shows what they are about. To spell it out they are ignoring their Mac users with impunity while furthering their own purposes.

Now the developers fixed it so that no one gets Shoutcast.It was a very convenient plugin far better than any of their others and fun to listen to. Too Bad!!!!

Negritude:Thanks for the tip.I already have Tom Legg's PPC version on y G5 and G4s.I meant that with the latest stabile version and the beta version of Songbird the Shoutcast plugin is missing. Once you install either of those versions you lose Shoutcast.

I have it on my MacbookAir. Don't get it or the latest version (stable) of this app as you will lose Shoutcast and all its radio stations. I see little improvement over 1.4.3 so it is not worth upgrading. Fortunately I still have 1.4.3 on my MacbookPro as I didn't upgrade. There seems to be no update for the plugin for Shoutcastt at present and I wonder now if there will ever be as probably Shoutcast wants to make you pay for Premium Channels and I never got an error message while using the plugin for Songbird.I still love Songbird even though I can't install on my PPC Macs. I can on Mandriva Linux so I am still giving it 5 Stars although they should have warned us that Shoutcast would be removed!

I just wish it was easier to get all the songs from iTunes over to songbird. It finds 184 files from my over 23000 tracks when I select Import Media from the file-menu and then choose the iTunes Music folder. I hope I'm doing something wrong. How are you supposed to proceed? The initial import didn't bring up all my files.

Songbird's come a long way since its initial 1.x releases, much like Miro, another Mozilla/Gecko media-centric derivative. I used to be constantly frustrated with Songbird's obscene memory/cpu requirements and its absolutely awful performance, but with Songbird 1.7.x, overall usability has been tremendously improved. Sadly, this release seems to have broken all of my add-ons, and many important add-ons (like the iPod Media Importer?) haven't been updated for sometime.

I wish it could import cds to flac.

Flac the de facto standard ? how did you come to this conclusion ? There is more software and more digital audio players out there the support other lossless formats more than flac. Why should iTunes support Flac ? ALAC plays perfect in iTunes what is the need of Flac. Lossless formats can be converted to another lossless format with zero quality loss.

I've been using Songbird for a few months, exclusively for FLAC playback (which iTunes still does not support). + Songbird has all the core features of iTunes plus a UI that's easy to use + Songbird supports FLAC. I need to restate this because FLAC is the de facto standard for uncompressed recordings. Playing FLAC in iTunes requires clumsy third-party apps or plug-ins, and converting them to Apple Lossless is not a solution in my opinion. + Songbird has a lot of extras, some of which are really nice (and mirror functionality you can get from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes) + Songbird is very customizable, if you like that sort of things. - Songbird can get bogged down. Don't ask why, it takes about 20 seconds to load on my Mac mini now (80GB of FLAC files). It used to take about 5 seconds. Searching can similarly be sluggish, as can quitting. - The free Songbird remote app for iPhone is not terribly useful. A paid-for version is available that's better, but Apple's free Remote app matched with the free iTunes is a nicer solution. - Some of the add-ons have weird interfaces. Not Songbird's fault, mind you. - It sometimes crashes.

I really liked Songbird on Windows, it was awesome. Getting it for the Mac, well, it doesn't seem as unique and useful. Plus it would crash and hang on me way too much.

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.

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...

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.

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.

a quantum leap from version 0.6! finally usable. wow!

Davvero un programma curato per grafica e opzioni. Complimenti a chi lo ha promosso e sviluppato.

Songbird is a neat idea. I've been following its progress over the last couple of years. It's clearly not ready to be reviewed yet, as it has not even reached the beta-testing stage (this is still very much alpha software), so I would suggest that any ratings given to it on MacUpdate so far should be deleted. That said, from what I've seen, this software has not come very far from where it was two years ago, and doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. I doubt this will ever mature into a great product, but would be happy to be pleasantly surprised.

If you listen to internet radio, music, etc., using Songbird whilst you're falling asleep - download App QuitTimer.

Thank you for the analogy, Darukaru, but it's not very helpful or accurate. Other programs built on the Mozilla application framework are excellent media players (take Miro, for example).

I'd like to give this high marks, but I can't see any reason not to use iTunes. iTunes 7 has several significant advantages, not the least of which include (1) genuine gapless play and (2) useful sound enhancers such as VolumeLogic. If you want an alternative music player, look into SSAudioPlayer. It shows some promise, and the developer has been responsive to requests.

Exceptionally promising! Sure it's a bit heavy at the moment, but it is in development. I work in a completely cross-platform environment, and a cross-platform player suits me down to the ground. I still use iTunes more, but with each release iTunes is getting more bloated and less worth it. With regards to the interface, this is a cross platform player, so of course it's never going to look mac native. I think it's a good thing to take a unique look rather than try to blend in unsuccessfully. Kudos to the developers, and keep up the good work on this amazing project!

iTunes feeling the heat? Are you serious? With this 110.5 MB buggy piece of bloatware? Good heavens... Long way to go before it is ready for prime time. what is it updated perhaps 2x a year? NEXT!

Finally, iTunes 2.0 . . . Yes, it's still buggy, but there is something in the coming -- local v/ remote never felt so deprecated. iTunes, do you feel the heat??

Great feature set and some well-cool ideas!! Not to sure about the darkish interface. A built-in iTunes theme would be most welcome. Excellent start - will keep an eye on this!