Review – Songbird 0.2 “Test Flight” September 30, 2006
Posted by mark in : General, Music, Review , trackbackSongbird seems to have improved a lot since the v0.1 media player that I tried last year. It supports video and plays my FLAC music files (though doesn’t display the ‘ID3‘ info), and the memory use seems a bit more under control. More comment when v0.2 launches properly
I’d like a management tool with ratings and smart playlists, but no DRM (and I used J River Media Center, not iTunes, before I switched from MP3 to FLAC). I’ll have Squeezeboxes, so if it worked with Slimserver : great
Songbird’s networked features look interesting, but I had an app for Odeo (like iPodder) that collected podcasts for my server, so I need to view the screencast again, to see what it could really add for me
Comments»
Hmmm, “podcast”-wise, our major innovation at the moment is to simply treat any HTML page as a playlist format and allow any http:// based playlist format to be “subscribed” and autodownloaded like a podcast.
So, in this way, we easily support peoples’ podcasts but we also allow you to automatically pull media from people when they update their weblogs even if they don’t bother publishing in rss.
mig
That’s certainly an attractive feature. If I can specify download location (eg. to always-on server, with lots of space, so that networked music players can always access it …rather than to space-poor laptop, which currently has Songbird) then it’s just what I’m after
Otherwise, I guess I could put Songbird on my server as well. I’d have to access it remotely from my laptop to make changes, but I assume that anything downloaded would be available in a ‘library’ to my laptop Songbird and my networked players …?
Update: I can specify url, automatic update (frequency, but not time of day) and destination folder (eg. on my server) …ref: para 1
However, Songbird must be running for the downloads to take place. So in my case, I’ll need to subscribe from a version on my server …ref: para 2
[...] I buy new music I hear on the radio (or Pandora), or recommended by Amazon and blog articles. I hear unsigned bands on podcasts (Odeo : an aggregator) and may visit their MySpace pages, but rarely go to concerts. I ’subscribe’ to some podcasts with Songbird (as I said), so that the files are saved to my server (and played with SlimServer), but don’t keep them. I don’t buy downloaded music, as it tends to use lossy codecs at low data rates (vs. CD’s) …and DRM [**]!. AllOfMP3.com is an exception, but I haven’t used it. [...]