Songbird

I have recently become a huge fan of Song­bird, a free multi-platform media player based on Mozilla’s XUL­Run­ner.

If you are any­thing like me, you may be ask­ing your­self what makes Song­bird spe­cial or worth your time. Why not just keep using iTunes, VLC, or Win­dows Media Player? Here are my rea­sons for choos­ing Song­bird over the competition:

• It runs on my Win­dows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 com­put­ers with the exact same inter­face and fea­ture set.
• Highly con­fig­urable playlists. For exam­ple, I can make a dynamic playlist that only shows songs that: have been rated 3 or more stars, haven’t been skipped more than 5 times, are at least 3.5 min­utes long, and were pro­duced between 1990 and 2000.
• With a minor tweak, Song­bird will save my song rat­ings in the MP3 file itself. This means I can put a song in my Drop­box, rate it at work, and by the time I get home the rat­ing will be there, too.
• Speak­ing of tweaks, Song­bird is as tweak­able and con­fig­urable as Fire­fox. You can get exten­sions, themes, adjust inter­nal set­tings that most peo­ple don’t care about, change how the title bar works.
• Has an inter­nal web browser that knows when you’re on a page with music. This means you can quickly and eas­ily down­load free music from places like Last.fm and have your new songs instantly imported into your music library.
• Also because it has an inter­nal web browser, I can open Slacker or Pan­dora in Song­bird and save myself hav­ing an extra tab in Fire­fox. (Bonus: If Flash starts act­ing up in Ubuntu, I just have to restart Song­bird and not my whole browser)

Okay, so now you are all stoked about Song­bird. You want to load it up in Ubuntu 9.10 and get groov­ing to your awe­some Vanilla Ice col­lec­tion. “Oh no,” you say to your­self, “Song­bird isn’t in the Ubuntu repos­i­tory!” That is where Get­Deb comes in.

Get­Deb is a third-party, unof­fi­cial repos­i­tory of Ubuntu pack­ages. It allows you to get updated soft­ware for Ubuntu sooner than wait­ing for it to make it through the offi­cial chan­nels, and saves you hours of try­ing to get ran­dom soft­ware to com­pile from source. I love it so much that Cor­ban Works has become a €5/month supporter.

Instal­la­tion of Get­Deb is easy and well-documented. If you aren’t a cur­rent Get­Deb user, please fol­low the instal­la­tion instruc­tions.

Once Get­Deb is installed, pull up the ter­mi­nal and type:

sudo apt-get install songbird

That’s it! You now have Songbird!

Unless you are using Win­dows. Or a Mac. Or Fedora. Or some other OS. If you are one of those peo­ple, you’ll have to go to Songbird’s site and down­load it straight from them.

I rec­om­mend a few addons to make your expe­ri­ence bet­ter (these work on any OS!):

• Adblock Plus: Blocks ads while using the browser part of Song­bird.
• Ama­zon Fetcher: Auto­mat­i­cally down­loads album art from Amazon.
• Birdti­tle: Lets you con­fig­ure what shows up in Songbird’s title bar (so you can, for exam­ple, have the artist and song title instead of “Songbird”).
• ubuntu-notifyOSD: Ties in with Ubuntu’s noti­fyOSD library so you can see lit­tle bub­bles in the cor­ner of your screen when­ever you change songs.
• MMKeys (32-bit) / MMKeys (64-bit): Makes the mul­ti­me­dia keys on your key­board work. If you didn’t explic­itly down­load the 64-bit ver­sion of Ubuntu, then you are prob­a­bly using the 32-bit ver­sion. But don’t worry: if you install the wrong one it won’t break any­thing, it just won’t work.

If you want Song­bird to save your rat­ings in your MP3 files, then you need to make one more tweak:

1. Open a browser tab in Song­bird, then go to about:config
2. Click the I’ll be care­ful, I promise! button
3. In the fil­ter box, enter songbird.metadata.ratings.enableWriting
4. Double-click false to change it to true
5. Close the tab

Oh, almost for­got! If you want Flash to work in Song­bird on Ubuntu 9.10, you can run this com­mand in terminal:

sudo cp /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/* /usr/share/Songbird/plugins/

Do you have a Song­bird tip I missed? Please leave it in the comments!