Songbird, the new competitor to MM?

[paulmt]

Well, IMHO Songbird 1 is moving in the right direction.
I really like the new UI and the speed is very good. All round the phrase "fast becoming the the FireFox of music players" is probably accurate.

Of course MM still remains the choice for large collection and serious database users but I do like the feel of songbird overall.
I am certainly not dismissing it as a serious contender, but then I have no idea where MM will be in the near future either.

On the purely visual side I like the look of Songbird better than MM and hope that MM's theming engine will improve to provide opportunity to produce skins that have the clean modern look of Songbird.

[Peke]

I wonder Why songbird pic looks so familiar ?

[paulmt]

I wonder Why songbird pic looks so familiar ?

Yeah your right, I thought that too!
My first thought was that they has stolen ideas from MM but then I couldn't remember whether MM had some of those features first or were adapted from Songbird or other programmes.
Most noticeable was the track browser but also the tree layout and album art pane.

Still maybe that's why I found SB1 appealing

[rovingcowboy]

songbird was made after mediamonkey paulmt. so mediamonkey did not take any ideas from it.

but rather they took ideas from mediamonkey.

the only use i can see for needing songbird is if you are using a non windows system that song bird can play on.

i'm sticking with the monkey.

[Peke]

Actually First impression in that Article was, "Why I haven't seen that skin for MonkeyRok?!?!?!?"

[gtbuzz]

I wasn't impressed with early versions of Songbird, but could see its potential (XULRunner back-end, great development community, etc). Decided to give it a whirl and am impressed with the 1.0 effort. It's not MM yet, but the gap is closing.

A few pros of MM:
Much more robust tagging capabilities.
File monitor (though it appears planned for a future version of Songbird).
Multiple artist support
Performance

What Songbird offers:
Tabbed interface - surprisingly refreshing even in a media player app
Add-ons website - much better than the hunting a pecking around the forums and websites for MM extensions
Add-on base - Some Firefox/Thunderbird add-ons can be utilized in songbird, which means they're hitting the ground running with extensions (Adblock, stylish, etc)
Many innovative ideas - concerts, download integration.

Fortunately MM is still a more polished product and 3.1 has already begun to add some exciting new features. Can't wait to see the future of both products.

[debu]

I love MM but after installing Songbird 1.0 it's looking VERY interesting. It has excellent dark skins, some interesting cool extensions: seeqpod.com music search and download to your library, same as hypemachine music search and library download, and those tabs are great. It took me a week to fiddle around MM to get it set up right due to extensions being all over the forums etc.. All the modular stuff seems to integrate well in SB, whereas Media Monkey feel disjointed after installing a lot of extensions.

At this point MM has many more features that I need, but man, Songbird is picking up quick. Interested to see what the next what MM 3.1 is bringing.