Songbird on Ubuntu

Well for a while now I've wanted to try Songbird on my linux box. I gave it a quick try when it first came out on my mac at work, but being a mac, nothing competes with iTunes. By far I've yet to see a music player that I like better than iTunes, but being a linux user at home, well no iTunes for me. Yes I know may people have managed to install iTunes for Windows via Wine, but the point of using linux, is that I don't want to use windows. Now I will admit, I do have wine installed and I've actually resorted to a few windows apps in the past, but I try very hard not to.

Well anyways... like any good gnome distribution, Ubuntu includes Rhythmbox as it's default music player coupled with GStreamer. I have nothing against Rhythmbox, it just doesn't do it all for me. Recently I've been enjoying the interface of Listen (link). It has a very clean interface, similar to that Rhythmbox, and it too includes a nice dock/tray functionality allowing me to preserve every inch of real estate on my screen. It is a little buggy and and 0.5 was just released last week (I have not tried the release version just yet), and overall in my opinion a better player when it comes to look and feel than Rhythmbox.

However back to the start of this entry, I've always wanted to give Songbird a try. I am a very happy user of all Mozilla creations. I'm an Firefox only browser, and if it isn't web mail, it has to be Thunderbird in my book. Mozilla has provided an excellent based for working off of. I've given Flock a swing, and enjoyed using Nvu when playing with web design, both excellent spin-offs of the Mozilla code base. And again back to Songbird... I guess I became a distant fan the minute I heard was was coming into existence. I wasn't to happy when I saw that is was only initially going to be available for Windows, but I was patient. Knowing that basically all of the Mozilla apps and spin-offs have always progressed this way, I felt it was worth waiting and keeping an I on it. Anyways, I did just that I watched and waited, as soon as I saw there was a Mac developer on the team, I waited for that version, and as soon as I saw they finally had Linux on the list... Well anyways, I quickly downloaded the first linux release as soon as it pop on the site. Unfortunately for me, I like all my apps to be nicely integrated with the Desktop, and while yes I know, I can easily add all the various gnome anchors and confs, I'm lazy. I've really enjoyed my last few years as a USER not a tinker. Anyways, being that it is presidents day, I'm at home! no access to iTunes, so I decided to give Songbird another quick whack. Being that this is the first attempt I've made at Songbird since moving to Ubuntu (was a long time Redhat/clone user), I first checked for a debian package, no luck. Than I decided to do a quick google search for write-ups and howto's for installing Songbird with Gnome and Ubuntu. To my enjoyment, I stumbled upon the following link:
Installing Songbird on Ubuntu
Here you will find 2 simple scripts, one for installing and one for un-installing. Well, like any good IT person who spends much time dealing with security issues, the first thing I did was read through the script looking for anything suspicious, finding none, I ran it. It works great, it asked a few quick questions to decide which version to download, and then for my password for sudo, and upon completion, in my Application menu I found a nice little Egg. Well part one complete, it is installed, now for usage.

So far so good. Upon the first load, it asked where all my music is located, and read in my entire library. The primary thing I use audio players for is streaming music. With all the other players I've tried, you have to search the web, find the playlist or stream uri, and then go through the process of adding a radio station, the nice part about Songbird is that it is a partial web browser. I just type the search query or surf the web and find links to playlist. I personally am a fan of Shoutcast and it is an included extension with Songbird, and I also like DI.fm, SKY.fm and Somafm.com , all have a nice selection of stations, most can actually be found in the Shoutcast directory. Anyways... I just browsed over to the various sites I wanted to add, right-clicked, and was provided with a "Add as Playlist" option and poof, there is a new playlist of that stream.

So far, I am happy, later this week, I'll start working with Podcasts!