Max says…

As I continue my journey toward migrating to Linux for full time desktop use there are a few applications that I miss, and I can’t always find suitable open source alternatives. One of those applications is iTunes. From reading forum posts and other articles on the web the consensus tends toward either Rhythmbox or Banshee.

Both players are very similar to iTunes and support my iPod; something was missing though. I was used to being able to type the first N characters of an artist name and to have the browser move to the correct location in my library. I was used to having the artist and album browse windows above the main library panel. And although the interfaces in these applications are very similar to iTunes, they didn’t seem quite complete.

This situation has been addressed with the wonderful Songbird application, available from http://www.songbirdnest.com . Songbird has all the features that were missing in the other two applications, and more! Visually, it may as well be a sibling of iTunes. It is built using the Mozilla framework and as such is very much web oriented. Although I’ve not played with all the features yet, it has a built in web browser and almost seems like Firefox skinned for music management.

Although it is still in development and is reported to be a bit buggy, it seems fine so far, which is brilliant for version 0.4! I should point out that if you are trying this on Ubuntu, remember to install the GStreamer tools and plugins (as well as the plugins from the bad repository as these are reported to be necessary) since Ubuntu doesn’t support MP3 playback out-of-the-box as the file format is restricted.

If you’re moving to Linux, and want to support Open Source Software then I’d highly recommend installing this excellent bit of kit!