Archive for September, 2010

Songbird Performance Issue With Large Libraries

Songbird has long since replaced iTunes as my default music player. Why? Well, iTunes seemed like a less-than-desirable alternative to Winamp after completing my migration from Windows to Mac. My main gripe with iTunes is the bad sound quality it generates. But I digress.

Issues with larger libraries

While having been very happy with Songbird overall, I have been concerned about Songbird’s slow performance with larger libraries.

For this project to survive this issue absolutely had to be addressed in upcoming versions. I realised that it would only be a matter of time before we’d see improvements—after all, Songbird is being built by a group of designers and developers that have previously worked on projects such as Winamp, Netscape, and Firefox, so I have quite a bit of confidence in its dev team.

Time is now

It looks like the time is finally here: after reading the developer’s blog on the subject I installed their nightly build to check for myself. I’m happy to be able to report that performance has been greatly improved in the latest nightly build. So, as things stand, all will be well in the next stable version of the software (v1.9).

I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all the Songbird devs who make the magic possible—keep up the good work everyone.

Further Reading