So, I’m a secret long-time Songbird fan. I know, I know. Once they dropped Linux support everybody (including myself) ran like hell and never looked back. As it turns out, they may have been right about their Linux user base – it wasn’t that significant. Mostly, they just haven’t had quite as much publicity since then, because people got understandably butthurt. However, Songbird has continued to evolve, so one can only assume that they’re OS X and Windows user base is still going strong. Of course, Songbird still works on Linux and they put out ‘unofficial’ builds all the time, though they’re always labeled as ‘unofficial’ and ‘untested’ (whatever that is supposed to mean). I actually tried it on Linux and, save for some issues with conflicting gstreamers (Songbird ships it’s own version of gstreamer), it worked fine. I don’t quite understand what they mean by “we no longer support Linux” when, three years later, they’re still putting out Linux builds and they still work. I find it bizarre that they have volunteers that can handle this, but they can’t handle at least some resemblence of official ‘support’ for Linux? Songbird is open source, so I highly doubt it’ll ever be broken as long as Linux users that happen to be programmers are using it. Nonetheless, I stopped using it when I moved to Linux a few years ago. I’ve used everything else, but not Songbird. But now I’m on a mac, and I don’t even want to think about touching iTunes. My good ol’ Clementine is fantastic, but Songbird supports all sorts of stuff that it doesn’t, with CD ripping being a good example. Of course, Clementine will get all the features that I like at some point because it has an awesome developer, and the things it doesn’t support are things I don’t really need, but hey, I’m on a platform that Songbird officially supports, so why not? Alas, I’m using Songbird once again. Oh, the nostalgia. Songbird is good. Still sucks up a fat portion of memory, but shit, most media players do at this point, and Songbird does more than most and does it prettier than most. I’m the last person on earth to give a shit how much memory things use as long as I have enough to fit what I’m working with in, and I have plenty. I’m an Emacs user. I like the kitchen sink and all that. Songbird is beautiful: The theme (feather) system is lovely, and Songbird can have virtually any look you can think of. That isn’t really what I was looking for though. Media views are important to me. I am extremely picky about how I am allowed to look at my music. In the screenshot above, notice there are several different panes. Those are ‘filter panes’. An alternative to the iTunesy list view, they allow me to look through my music and narrow things down based on genre, album, and artist. I’m actually surprised at how few media players have something like this. It seemed like a massive miss to me in that new fangled Miro thingy and is my top major reason for not using it. And, if filter view isn’t enough for you, the media view stuff in Songbird is extensible! You can actually add new media views via extensions, so you have an infinite number of ways to look at your media library and if you’re a programmer, you can create them yourself. This brings us to extensions, another neat feature of Songbird. Songbird is very Mozillia-y, being a descendent of Firefox, and has a very thorough extension system. When you think of Songbird extensions, think of Firefox extensions. They’re quite similar in capability. Chatzilla actually runs in Songbird, if you need an idea. Songbird is very modular and a lot of even relatively basic functionality is implemented as extensions, including the lyrics pane in my screenshot and even stuff like syncing. And this brings us to syncing! Songbird is great at syncing. Syncing is implemented as various extensions for MTP and MSC devices.I use my HTC Evo as my little music box, so I enjoy easy ways to throw music at it. Android is great because you can just drag and drop music into the file system just like you would on your own computer. However, there is something to be said for being able to sync from your desktop media player just by dragging and dropping it. This *almost* worked out of the box. Songbird detected my Evo as soon as I plugged it in. Syncing works out of the box for some devices because these devices are known and configured beforehand. Songbird has to know what types of media a device can take and thus it has to know about that device beforehand for it to work perfectly. If it doesn’t know about the device, it has to assume it is just a random standard media device and only assumes that it can play MP3 files. Apparently, for some reason, it couldn’t figure out my poor Evo, and my music collection mostly consists of OGG files. Jesus wept. So, Songbird keeps a file in the root of a device’s file system called .SBSettings.xml. This file can tell Songbird its capabilities (what it can play and what it can do). Therefore, it must be changed. I’m not a huge fan of editing XML files by hand just to sync music to a phone, so I found Devise, a fantastic little extension for Songbird for editing .SBSettings.xml. It provides a simple UI for defining your phone’s capabilities. I got all that done in about 30 seconds and was syncing music. If you find yourself in this position and Songbird can’t figure out your device, grab that extension. 9 times out of 10, you’ll spend hours trying to figure out how to write the XML properly yourself, especially if you aren’t a programmer. .SBSettings.xml isn’t meant to be edited by hand by users. Beyond this, Songbird does the typical things you’d expect from a media player. It actually even has some support for videos, but I’m not quite sure how much. If you haven’t heard much about it in a while, rest assured that Songbird is still heavily developed and well supported. If you’re on OS X or Windows, go ahead and give it a go. If you’re on Linux, hell, even you could give it a go. The whole “we’ve dropped Linux support” thing seems like a case of blowing ones wad a bit too early. That said, they could break it tomorrow and nobody would have even the slightest right to bitch about it because they would be able to play the “Hey, we called it…” card, rightfully. Songbird works on Linux right now, but it may not work forever. A lot of people just jump shipped and abandoned Songbird when they dropped Linux support when they could have saved the whole project if they had just stepped up and helped out. If you like Songbird, consider helping out with the Linux support. Nightingale is a step in the right direction, but they’re still having trouble getting off the ground. They’re keeping people updated but progress is obviously slow, and that is a direct result of not enough organization and manpower. Help them out. Nightingale is an important project. P.S. This whole post was meant to be about syncing Songbird with Android devices, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t turn it into a whole post about Songbird. Hope you enjoyed it and learned something anyway. :)