Grauw’s blog

For quite a while I’ve been using the musikCube music player now, which is awesome. However, it’s not under active development anymore, so I was browsing around a bit for alternatives. Winamp, Windows Media Player and iTunes are the well-known ones, and then there is Songbird.

I knew Songbird was under development, but it seems it has now arrived at version 1.0, so stable enough for general use. My first impressions are good, it is actually very similar to musikCube. The only downside is that even though it is built on the same toolkit as Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, it unfortunately doesn’t have the system’s native look. I will have to see how well it copes with my laptop’s 120 dpi screen before deciding to use it.

Either way, benefit of being built on Mozilla technologies is that it is relatively easy to extend. I made a skin (‘feathers’) for Songbird today which removes the weird title-bar-menu combination that Songbird has by default. With that, I can try to start using it.

» “More Native” skin for Songbird
» Source code (Mercurial repository)