Songbird

As a user of the Linux operating system, Fedora 9 currently, I find myself, at times, frustrated by the fact that the software for Linux is not always as solid as that for Windows or Mac. Now, this is generally expected, and it is truly amazing the software packages that Linux has considering it is all open source. I also like to rub it in the face of die hard Windows users that my system uses staggeringly less memory... and to those who use Mac... you'll find your way out of debt sometime in the next two centuries, I promise. Anyway, the real purpose of this post was to say that, finally, iTunes has come to Linux!

Well... not really. In fact, it's not even made by Apple. It is however, made by one of the best open source companies in existence, Mozilla. Yes, first it was Firefox and Thunderbird, now it's Songbird. Songbird is an open source media player and web browser combined! Yes take iTunes and a lower level Firefox, smash them together and you get Songbird, minus a few features of each that happened to fly off in either direction.

Still, Songbird 1.0 is thus far fantastic. I have yet to have any issue with it, although I'm sure bugs will occur eventually. But for a first release, the web browsing capabilities are solid, based off of the Gecko engine. Speaking of a bug... I just held my backspace key to delete one of my numerous mistypings and the player tweaked, but found it's footing again. Wow, am I good to predict a bug or what!? Not an issue I'm too concerned about... just tried to replicate it with no success.

So I say, if you are looking for a "light weight" iTunes, try Songbird, you might find that you enjoy it's layout and web capabilities and decide to go the way of Mozilla instead of Apple for your media player. Now if you like "super light weight" media players, this is not for you. It has flashy graphics, if you'd like it to, and is still very similar to iTunes... in fact, here is a screenshot with the iTunes theme installed. Very slick, I highly recommend this player, especially to those who run Linux and have found that Apple's lack of interest in releasing iTunes on Linux to be upsetting.



Thanks Mozilla!

And yes, I am using the Songbird browser to write this, as you may have guessed from the bug earlier!