Songbird Drops Linux Support 356
An anonymous reader writes "The Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a shocking announcement, as Songbird has its roots in open source. Songbird will, however, continue to be available for Windows and Mac."
In their blog post on the subject, the developers said, "We remain loyal to Linux and the ideology it represents, so we will maintain a version of the software for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform. We’ll make that version available to the community. We will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. That said, those builds will not be tested and may not pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team."
Sorry to hear about that, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've tried Songbird for Ubuntu each time a new release came out and frankly, it was a horrible experience.
I loved the layout of the software, but having to wait damn near a half hour (or more) each time I'd start it up to reindex all my music was annoying, to say the least.
I've ended up just sticking with Rhythmbox, which is OK,but I really did prefer the Songbird layout.
Re:Alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
XMMS 1.x is no longer supported and I hate the client/server model used in 2.x Amarok won't install without KDE and Rhythmbox is nearly unusable for my needs. Granted I am running FreeBSD. VLC is ok for most of my needs but I've been using Grooveshark [grooveshark.com] lately to bolster up my music collection.
Maybe it is just because it has fierce competition (Score:5, Interesting)
So far on Linux desktop there have been three excelent iTunes like media players - Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok (last one mostly after features not gui). All three players excels in different ways, but what's important - they just work and I doubt we need more iTunes type clones in ui and functionality for Linux platform.
I know that Songbird guys are those positively mad people who did huge piece of dirty work to port Gstreamer to Windows and OS X and it shows what's their main priorities are. And that's fine, because Windows and Mac need a nice open source music player too (and ported Gstreamer framework of course).
Performance Issues (Score:4, Interesting)
If there was ever a music player on Linux that was worse than the worst versions of Amarok, it's Songbird. Nice ideas, but it never ever did work correctly for me, and it wasn't for lack of memory or processing power. I kept installing it and removing it from time to time to see how it was going.
It's like they never tried getting it to perform correctly on Linux. Oh well.
Maybe it works better on Windows, but I'll never know since I never use that unless I absolutely have to.
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BMO
Re:Why the shock? 0% of the market is not worth it (Score:4, Interesting)
Old school Unix? MacOS? You must be joking?
I say that as an old SunOS user that ignores his mini that sits under the desk.
I might want to steal some Mac apps but that's about it. Really, I would be more interested in stealing some Win apps.
MacOS is for grannies that can't be trusted not to browse sites they've been told to stay away from.
Songbird Irrelevant Anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
In my opinion Songbird became irrelevant anyway the moment it dropped ipod support. I don't know how they think they can gain any semblance of marketshare, or cred for that matter, by dropping key features from it's codebase. It ran like crap anyway. Who builds a music player on top of mozilla?
Re:Farewell (Score:3, Interesting)
>he hasn't heard of the media library pane in vlc
http://wiki.videolan.org/Media_Library [videolan.org]
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BMO
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
What needs do you have that Amarok satisfies but Rhythmbox doesn't? Just curious.
Re:Alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
That program does have a total fucked up file requester. There is no way to write the name of the directory you want to load music from.
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
I couldn't agree with you more. This is why I have always used XMMS, and recently switched to Audacious. I don't *want* something to "manage" my "library". I don't want a database. I don't want 1,000,000 features. I just need a simple, fast, efficient music player. And xmms/audacious do just that :)
(I do use Amarok sometimes when I need something more powerful... but haven't used it since KDE 4, since they totally hosed the user interface :( )
Re:Help in TFA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just checked my iTunes/Mac and it has 122MB resident, not doing anything. Clicked a bit around, it's now 156MB. I have less songs than you have.
Gstreamer is a big part of the cancer... (Score:1, Interesting)
...that killed X on the desktop.
Gstreamer, Bonobo, HAL, dbus, gnomevfs... I'm looking at all of you and more. Twisty mazes of library dependencies, all different; absolutely ZERO FUCKING BENEFIT delivered to the user... fuck them, fuck the Songbird guys for helping them spread, and fuck you just because I'm feeling generous at the moment.
Re:Help in TFA? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just checked my iTunes/Mac and it has 122MB resident, not doing anything. Clicked a bit around, it's now 156MB. I have less songs than you have.
Although that's not likely to strain a new-ish system, it's still a lot of RAM in absolute terms. Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 9.10 uses just under 41MiB of resident memory with a 25GiB library of 5300+ music files loaded. This includes a number of plugins enabled, such as for cover art and support of various external players.
Re:Help in TFA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Winamp is far more powerful...it has its idiosyncrasies but once I got used to the power-user features, I have been unable to drop it. Itunes is like a toy music player...amarok gets rid of the toy distinction but I have not been able to make it match winamp when it comes to interaction between the library and the active playlist which has its own pretty advanced set set of queuing options (you can fake some of this in recent itunes by forcing everything to play under the guise of itunes dj but it is kind of silly).
Songbird was starting to be an interesting program...I think it was getting ready to surpass Amarok and move close to winamp in the way it handled libraries/active playlists.
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
QT libraries are no problem, but KDE are. for starters, they usually screw up Brasero and the likes. Not to mention you have to load all that stuff and take more memory, etc.
If you just use k3b for burning, you wouldn't notice Brasero, Gnomebaker, Nautilus (cd writing) are screwed, or wrongly assume they are broken.
So the Widget libraries are not as much problem as the Desktop Environment libraries. I always prefer to avoid anything that depends on the opposite DE library of the environment I'm using. When i use gnome, i avoid kde libs like the plague. When i use Kde, i avoid gnome libs like the plague. Either way qt and gtk libs are fine. If I'm not using either DE, then avoiding DE libs is good to save memory ^_^
XFCE in theory only needs gtk, but Xubuntu became so bloated because many included apps depend on gnome libs, and now uses more memory than Ubuntu (gnome) itself...