Friday 25 July 2008

Songbird media manager

Today I was going to post some praise of Songbird, the open source media manager based on Mozilla Firefox. That plan has changed because of two incidents:

1. Even with the "MTP" device plugin loaded, Songbird can't connect to my Zen Micro or even seem to detect it. This is forgivable for now, because Songbird is still in beta.

2. I tried Songbird as an alternative to iTunes for Deb's iPod. The intention was that it would not try to erase the iPod contents just because it connected to a different computer. Though it does allow manual management of iPod contents relatively well, it refuses to synchronise the full contents automatically without erasing the device first. This is not an accident or a requirement of the device - it is a deliberate sabotage as bad as what Apple does with iTunes.

I suppose this crippling was done either at the behest of Apple or in order to avoid their wrath, but I think it's a bad idea any way you look at it. This decision makes Songbird only slightly more useful than iTunes instead of an awesome alternative.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I was also unable to get Songbird to rip a CD, despite this being a standard feature of media managers. No plugins existed to do any ripping either, as far as I could tell.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I will probably continue to use it, though.
PPS - Because slightly better is still better.

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