Songbird portable

Greetings all, The Angry Systems Administrator has arrived to clean up the mess yet again. Oh, alright. This time the Bozo In charge, hasn’t screwed things up. ((It’s early yet, give him time)) In this case, I’m writing about a music utility I’ve looked at in the past, but had rejected.

It’s called Songbird and like Winamp or any number of other players, it will let you play music on your computer. In the past I used to use Winamp, but of late, (Pretty much since the original developer sold it to AoL), it’s become a bloated buggy piece of drek. The last time I used it, (Which was also the last time I ever used it), It hosed my system so badly I had to rebuild it…TWICE! (I made the mistake of putting Winamp on it again)

After that I walked away from Winamp forever. I started looking around for something else and found Songbird. I gave it a go, but didn’t like what it did to my file structure as well as other issues. I then landed on Atunes. I’ve been using that program for some time now and rather like it. It is a bit slow on the development and updates, but I’ve never had any real problem with it.

However, circumstances have forced me to look for portable alternatives to most of my favorite applications. Atunes isn’t designed to be a portable application so I had to get on my horse and start looking.

Since I wrote about portable applications a couple of months ago I started there. My first find was Cool Player. I was not happy with it. In fact, I found it to be almost as bad as Winamp has become. I continued through the choices and found Songbird Portable. I was surprised at first that something that complex had been made a portable app, but What they heck? I gave it a go.

After installing, screwing it up, deleting and reinstalling it several times, I finally got it to do what I wanted. This is the advantage of a portable application. It doesn’t write to the registry and everything is contained in one directory. To remove it, simply delete that directory.

I did a bit more research and found that Songbird was developed by the same bunch that did Firefox. This meant lots of plugins. Not as many as Firefox, but enough to bring the program up to a usable state. One of the plugins ties into Last.fm which we’re using to show what music we’re playing at any moment. I also set up Atunes to do the same thing.

In the last few days it’s become a bit of a tossup which one I like better. Atunes or Songbird. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. For the moment, I think I’ll use Songbird on laptops and Atunes on desktops. One advantage Atunes has over Songbird is the ability to minimize to the tray natively. Songbird requires you to get a plugin and install it. Since this app is based on Firefox, you get that wonderful Firefox requirement to restart the program. Oh well, just install a bunch of plugins at one time then do a single restart. 🙂

At this point I can fully recommend Songbird. I’ll probably add it to the Links page on the main site later on. The program is free of course and if you don’t like it, you can just delete it. ((Portable version only))

Have a great New Year!

~The Angry Systems Administrator~