Songbird Media Player
Yesterday I took a look at Songbird Media Player. I must admit that I was very excited as a read about this open source media player. why? Because it has many things that look like my favorite web browser: Firefox! 
The screenshot bellow shows the default look & feel of this application that looks a lot like iTunes. I like a lot the library navigation. You can filter the musics by year, artist and album in a simple way.
How about Firefox similarities that I talked about? Here it goes. It is “developers friendly”. Has themes and add-ons support like Firefox. It allows tabbed browsing with a Firefox-based internal browser. As you can see in the screenshot below some interface elements like options and Add-ons menu are similar to the analogous ones in Firefox. Almost a copy of them, which can be nice while getting used to Songbird interface. This project is powered by Mozilla (which explains a lot 
).
The screenshot below which shows a album browser isn’t a built-in feature. It is a Java-based add-in which I installed. Looks nice but has some issues about resizing, and hangs a little bit too… You can navigate through the add-in list in here.
My deception was when I played some songs… Songbird takes a lot of memory and CPU usage in order to work.
I’ve tried iTunes 7.5 and tough it uses an considerable amount of memory it almost “doesn’t require” CPU time. I must confess that this memory usage of 47Mb doesn’t bother me. 2Gb of RAM is enough to handle it And I’m used to Firefox memory usage as you can also see in the screenshot.
With Windows Media Player 11 I had some great results about both CPU and memory. It is the least I can expect with a media player built-in into the operating system.
I must confess that I don’t use media players that often, and when I use it’s just to listen to music and leave the player running in background. Songbird seems promising, but for now I won’t use it because it doesn’t fit my needs (low memory, low CPU,shuffle and playing!). Although my experience wasn’t good, don’t stay stick to what I have written. Install it and give it a try!
