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Songbird Drops Linux Support
An anonymous reader writes "The Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a shocking announcement, as Songbird has its roots in open source. Songbird will, however, continue to be available for Windows and Mac."
In their blog post on the subject, the developers said, "We remain loyal to Linux and the ideology it represents, so we will maintain a version of the software for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform. We’ll make that version available to the community. We will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. That said, those builds will not be tested and may not pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team."
Songbird is a music player and library organizer similar to iTunes or Winamp. It's based on the Mozilla Firefox Gecko framework. It inexplicably uses about 130MB of RAM while idle.
I currently use Herrie where I formerly used XMMS and Audacious. It is a light textmode player that does everything I want. In fact, I originally wrote a textmode frontend for XMMS/Audacious simply because it was more convenient to use that way. Later it turned out to have other uses, for example controlling my media machine via ssh from my work computer.
My main problem with most music player software today is the idea of a 'media library'. In order to play a file, you first have to put it in the library. I understand such a database has its benefits, but to me it is unnecessary complication of a simple operation. In fact, I do have a custom script for managing music files burnt to DVDs, but in the unix spirit I like to keep thing separate, so I am free to use different players.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Out of curiosity I dowloaded songbird just now and tried to install on my Windows 7 machine. Got a nice dialog saying "We don't support this OS. You can try, but things may not work properly." So you don't support Linux, and you don't support the latest version of Windows (or, I'm willing to bet, Vista)... Why not just call yourself a Mac product and be done with it?
N.B. I am a Windows 7 user and it did say when I installed that Windows 7 was not supported.
I dropped iTunes out of my home setup a while back and thought I've give Songbird a go. I've been running it for about 4 months now and I have to say, in IMO, it is one aweful piece of software which I rarely use now. Barring the crashes (ack. NB above) its usability is pretty poor.
I hope others have hade better experiences with it.
>In the end I've never found anything I've liked quite as much as Winamp 2.95.
Then you will probably be quite happy with xmms ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmms ) or audacious ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_Media_Player ). I know *I* am :)
If you want a heavyweight, feature-packed, system and not just a simple player, check out Amarok ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(software) ) or Rhythmbox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmbox )
It was the only fully featured music player / organizer (that I know about) that ran on the platform trinity (Linux, Windows, and Mac) out of the box. It looked and acted the same irregardless of the platform.
This is rather important in my opinion, and I find myself recommending these kinds of programs (Firefox, Open Office, VLC, Gimp, Pidgin, etc), because when a computer illiterate friend learns a program like this, they are less locked into their OS. They can use them on their Macs at work, their Windows at home, and Linux if they happen to stumble on it, and they'll feel comfortable with the same familiar programs.
Songbird is far from perfect, but it is an easy switch from iTunes (it can keep the iTunes library in sync with its own), has more features (with some excellent addons) and plays more file types. So now I'm looking for the next platform independent player / organizer to recommend.
Since it is UNusable by other processes, I fail to see the difference.
*facepalm*
mmap()ed memory is both usable by other processes in the sense that other processes can mmap the same file, and usable by other processes in the sense that it's not necessarily all in actual, physical RAM (and will never be in swap).
It's more or less the difference between "This program has opened a 1 gig file for reading and read a single byte" and "This program uses 1 gigs of RAM". Does that make it clearer?
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