The Songbird team have announced that they will no longer be officially supporting Linux versions of their media player.
Community versions, will, however still be provided but there is no guarantee that these versions will see new features of thorough bug testing before release.
So if you’re a glass half full kind of geek it’s not entirely bad news for Linux Songbird users – it means it’s sort of up to us now. Many PPC Mac users have already relied on community builds of Songbird for a long time and whilst they have often been released a few months behind official releases they remain passionately tended to.
So here comes one of those opinion pieces where I tend to go against the grain.
Songbird, Schmong bird
I don’t think the loss of Songbird is a big deal. And here’s a quick kung-foo style bulletpoint list of why I think so: –
- Rhythmbox just got the UbuntuOne store so legally purchasing music is a snap.
- Banshee has better media player support and has been managing videos for a while now.
- Both of the above have great extensions support so adding context info, last.fm, lyrics etc is a snap.
Songbird, whist having some awesome features, still has yet to find its feet and dropping Linux support officially and focusing on Windows and Mac may prove to be more beneficial to the project – as will turning it into an all-in-one media centre (Songbird had added video support). For music alone Songbird was just one fish too many in the sea of music players.
And lets face it – Songbird was never the most agile or flawless beast on Linux anyway. This moves will save both camps a lot of headaches.
Thanks to all who sent this in!