Don’t Tease Me Like That Part Deux:
I’ve been waiting for about 85 years for Songbird, hailed as the greatest thing in media players since iTunes, to have a Mac version. Well they do now. So I went ahead and download it.
I give it a B-.
The thing looks great. It’s got a lot of neat features like being able to search mp3 blogs and listen to their music files right in the player. You can also tag songs to create snazzier playlists. But it misses the point in one very big way.
I am not looking for another application to fondle. Music listening is, for the most part, a passive experience, turn on, hit play, go. I do not want to hoover over my music player (which is the problem I had with MyStrands, although that may have changed), tagging and moving songs nor use it as a second rss reader to find new music. I’ve got Pandora and Last.fm. I‘ve got Google Reader. I gave at the office.
To convince me to abandon iTunes, I would need to be able to use Song Bird with my iPod (no dice) and some album art would be nice (this one I don’t get. How hard is it to sync the thing up with Amazon or Gracenote and pull down some album art). I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got this in the works because they seem like smart folk. But right now, Songbird is a music geek product and I’m only a music geek a few minutes a day. I’m just an ordinary music fan the rest.