I’ve been trying out the Songbird music player for a couple of days now and, a few niggles aside, am impressed. The most notable aspect is the range of add-on features, some of which work much better than others.

Ronald Carson wrote about the player itself yesterday, so do check out his piece if you aren’t familiar with the player. I’ve generally found it quite useful, combining some of the better features of both Windows Media Player and iTunes and adding some real useability – it’s extremely easy to edit song data, especially for entire albums. I’d need to have CD ripping and automatic scanning of my music directories for new content to make it my default player, but both of those are in the works.

I was impressed to see it played formats such as FLAC which are often used for bootleg (unauthorized live concert recordings) downloads, though I was disappointed to find there’s no easy way to open and play a folder of songs without first adding it to the library; that’s a bit of an irritation as I often download music to listen to once rather than keep permanently. And I missed some Windows Media Player features such as Album Art in the library view or the way every album title, artist or genre acts as a link to the relevant listings in the library.

However, the real benefit of the Mozilla-produced player is that it has Firefox style add-ons produced by independent developers. Here are my thoughts on the ones I’ve tried:

mashTape produces links to Artist information, Amazon reviews, News, Photos and Videos related to the currently playing track. I didn’t find much point in this as most of the info was either stuff I’d already know, or something I’d have already looked for if I really cared. The photos are generally too low quality for the display, while the videos are generally for the artist rather than the particular song.

BirdQuizz is a simple game where a random track plays and you have to choose (as quickly as possible) which of five randomly selected songs from your collection it is. It works reasonably well (albeit it with a few pauses), but I don’t see myself using it often: it’s the type of diversion better suited to a portable device.

MediaFlow is a shameless reproduction of the iTunes Cover Flow. In terms of operation it works identically, though the images are much poorer quality to be a fully adequate substitute.

Lyric Master is my favourite add-on by far. It automatically retrieves and displays lyrics for the currently playing track; where it can’t find lyrics it will provide a one-click link to a Google search. I found the feature gets lyrics about 70-80 percent of the time with my collection, usually within a second or two of the song playing. This is one of those features that nobody really needs, but once you’ve experienced, you’d really miss.

Exorcist searches through your library for ghost tracks (those which are still in the library but the file itself is deleted) and duplicate tracks. The former works well, but the latter is unfortunately useless in practice as, whenever it spots a duplicate, it simply offers to delete one of the files at random. That’s hardly an effective way to clean up your library.

It may sound as if these add-ons aren’t much to speak of overall. However, the beauty of such systems is that it doesn’t matter how many pointless or ineffective features people create as long as you can find some which are useful. And the chances are that the criticisms I’ve levelled at some features will be addressed either by the original developers or rival creators looking to do a better job.

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Entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 3:09 pm under Media players, Open source.

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