Songbird Linux Support Falls Out Of A Tree

[Joe Sixpack]

1) Songbird's Linux support has always sucked. They tried to used the monolithic model instead of using libraries already present on your computer. Even though it's open source compiling it has always been a crap shoot.

2) Songbird is barely more than an iTunes to most people, and the ones who don't like iTunes usually prefer Mediamonkey or foobar2000 over Songbird. So why the heck would they focus on Windows and Mac?

3) Who the hell told them to focus on video? The audio still needs work and I keep hearing complaints about broken iPod functionality. I use VLC on Windows and SMPlayer on Linux, so why even bother with video? Trying to be an all-in-one player now puts Songbird in the same category as WinAmp - and I don't think that's a comparison the devs should go after.

[RealNC]

Lol, dropping Linux support actually just shows how "popular" this so-called "media player" is. Songbird has other issues, more serious ones than the dropped Linux version.

IMO, good riddance. Songbird is so severely broken, I can't even begin to imagine why anyone would use it. And in fact, almost no one does (with Linux being dropped being just a side effect of that.)

[kgonzales]

The last decent music player was XMMS. No Linux music player I have tried since XMMS has had a reasonably good equalizer and pre-amp support. Songbird was getting there, but now its gone. I abandoned Linux as a reasonable OS for music. To me, for that workload, the entire OS/app stack has been a huge regression from what I had 10 years ago.

[DeepDayze]

It should die Amarok 2 rocks.

This...and amarok's getting better and better with each release. If I want something light I'd use Audacious, but amarok's the one. Songbird is rather kludgy and hopefully the Lyrebird fork will fix the interface and usability problems.

[liam]

As long as you don't fear your passwords being sent to MS (don't worry, they've said they won't use them as long as you don't publicly trash MS), it's a nice music management system, though Songbird's Genius workalike plugin was the best I've seen.

[kraftman]

The last decent music player was XMMS. No Linux music player I have tried since XMMS has had a reasonably good equalizer and pre-amp support.

Amarok 2.3.0 has equalizer probably for the first time in 2.x series, but if it's good enough? I don't know. Maybe you could give it a try.

[DeepDayze]

Amarok 2.3.0 has equalizer probably for the first time in 2.x series, but if it's good enough? I don't know. Maybe you could give it a try.

The equalizer is quite usable for me in amarok...also Audacious has it too

[spidernik84]

Guayadeque and Exaile are good amarok clones. I discovered the former, and it's quite feature rich, probably the closest to Amarok.
Both are GTK players.

Songbird's devs choice is a bad one indeed, but i honestly admit it's not that big loss. A promising player, but nevertheless a resource hungry behemoth just to play a bunch of songs. No way. Farewell Songbird.

[monraaf]

Guayadeque and Exaile are good amarok clones. I discovered the former, and it's quite feature rich, probably the closest to Amarok.
Both are GTK players.

Guayadeque, or however you spell it, let alone pronounce it... would be quit a nice player if it were a GTK application. But it's not, it's a wxWidgets app and unfortunately looks totally out of place on Lucid. I'll stick to Rhythmbox.

[kgonzales]

The equalizer is quite usable for me in amarok...also Audacious has it too

Amarok is KDE based... non-starter for me. Audacious looks promising. Thx.