Songbird Drops Support For Linux | Hacker News Reader

Songbird Drops Support For Linux

digitizor.com

35 pointsnoarchy24 comments

Not a huge deal. It's sad to see a promising project go, but let's face it - it was bloated and not receiving the attention it deserved, not living up to its real potential. At the moment, clementine seems to be the best linux music player.

I last checked out Songbird two years or so ago and again today. That program really got a lot worse – from rather lean to bloated. Quite a disappointment, especially because I liked the idea. A good music library app besides iTunes for Macs would be great. (iTunes is pretty good but some details could be better and I would prefer for it to rather not become this huge syncing hub. Using the exact same UI which is used for tagging songs to tag ebooks cannot be a good idea.)

"Quite a disappointment, especially because I liked the idea."

The idea of building a music player on the Mozilla platform? That's what killed it, because it's actually a terrible idea.

Mozilla is responsible for screwing over a lot of developers by making glorious promises about the Mozilla "platform", but in fact to the best of my knowledge nobody has made it into anything "significant" that wasn't already in Netscape 4. And those who did went to great effort to do so (nvu in particular) and it is not at all clear they actually came out ahead vs. the other choices they had. (I know there's a handful of other dinky apps, but I'm not talking about whether someone bodged together a small local app in native XUL. The lofty rhetoric says that not only should Songbird be working better under Mozilla than it would in other places, it should be joined by the same kind of numerous "significant" apps that exist under QT or GTK.)

Historically, for the last six or seven years, trying to turn Mozilla into anything other than a browser has had exactly this result; bloated, buggy programs that barely work with a strong tailwind. And I'll tell you why: It's the platform. Mozilla is a browser. They made a lot of terrible platform choices that they managed to power through because it was a platform with basically one app (and Thunderbird off to the side), but it has not been able to get past that.

(RDF stores, where the fact that the RDF store is in RDF brings complexity, but no value for the complexity beyond other storage technologies. XPCOM, an abstraction layer with the same problem, nowhere near enough value brought for the complexity. XUL/XBL sort of eventually redeemed itself, but long after it should and I bet if you tried direct development in it for a "real app" it would still break your heart. And it still arguably fails the "not enough value for the complexity" test; lots of other things do what XBL does, much more simply and reliably. Note I know some of these have been supplanted; this is not a catalog of problems of today, but major errors the platform has made over time. And building something like a music app which is fundamentally multithreaded in Mozilla...? And the Mozilla of several years ago no less.)

Fortunately, it mostly doesn't matter, because it has done a pretty good job at being that one app. The only cost is all the developer hours sunk into developing on a "platform" where the only thing going for it is the grandiosity of the promises.

I say this partially because I was bitten, but not as bad as the Songbird developers.

Komodo IDE and Komodo Edit by ActiveState is a pretty successful use of the Mozilla platform.

It used a "tweaked" Mozilla, I don't know if it still does. (I poked around but it doesn't say.)

http://trentmick.blogspot.com/2007/09/open-komodo-and-code_8...

which contains the interesting quote in the comments "Most current XUL Runner apps that I know about (those that get mentioned on planet.mozilla.org) tend to have their own patches against XUL Runner that haven't yet made it into the core sources to fix issues specific to their app."

Which was my experience with the platform too.

It is true that I have missed that, but you'd need to cite another twenty or thirty projects of a similar size before you'd catch up to the hype. (And I'd still question whether Komodo actually gets anything out of being on Mozilla vs. QT. Cost/benefits analysis of things on the Mozilla platform tend to miss the opportunity costs of having started out on a better-but-more-humble framework in the first place.)

(And while I won't hammer on it too hard, it would be nice if the app that is putatively on the platform actually ran on the platform instead of a modified platform. I don't have to go patching QT or GTK every time I want to make an app. If someone knows that it runs on XULRunner, great, please say so. All my googling is getting is people saying how nice it would be.)

"All my googling is getting is people saying how nice it would be."

Because that's all there is. It doesn't run on XULRunner. Getting it to do so continues to be a project goal, but it doesn't as of right now.

Maybe successful financially, but too slow for me to use.

I've never had any problems with slowness in Komodo IDE.

I like Amarok.

Amarok 1.4 was amazing. Unfortunately, they haven't reached parity with the KDE 4 remake. That said, Clementine is basically a rewrite of Amarok 1.4 to QT 4, meaning it doesn't affect KDE users, and it actually looks native for Gnome users.

I agree, and I'm going to check out Clementine now. I forced myself to upgrade Amarok after they took 1.4 out of Portage. I've found it really doesn't play well with pulseaudio (forcing me to get rid of that), and there are some very weird quirks, but it's getting better. Just wish they'd put back the sorted-playlist-but-random-playing-order again (it was there in one of the older 2.x's...), instead of just randomizing the playlist.

Edit: And after checking out Clementine, I have to agree with the commenter below that it's not quite there yet.

Just checked out clementine as well. It's missing my killer feature still. Music queuing. The Queue this song group of features really fit the way I prefer to listen to my music. It's getting there though. I've been dissapointed with Amarok2 it felt like a step down from amarok 1.4. That might be just because it was heavily rewritten for kde4 more so than intentioned though.

It has its quirks, that's for damn sure. It's got some really cracked out UI choices, but it works for my ipod, I can rate songs and then get a random list out of them so I'll cope for the time being. I'm just impressed it works for the 10s of GB of music I have. Rhythmbox failed miserably.

I had nothing but problems with Amarok - trying to set it up was a long, aggravating and ultimately fruitless exercise in frustration. Rhythmbox, on the other hand, may be bloated but at least it worked as expected right away.

Clementine looks promising but isn't quite there yet. I'm pretty happy with Quodlibet for now but will keep Clementine and the Songbird Fork on my radar.

For Gnome, I really like Decibel (http://decibel.silent-blade.org/). It does nothing but play music, which is exactly what I want in a music player.

The article is fair enough but how badly can you monetise a blog? forcing me to view two adverts and scroll before I see any content, I really dislike blogs that do this, make a quick buck rather than build an audience over time.

Yeah I noticed the spelling mistakes that were interspersed throughout the post. Not very professional. Perhaps English isn't the author's first language.

Why even link to the digitizor article? It contains no more information that that in the Songbird blog; it's just a poorly-paraphrased rip with scant commentary even, other than a "this blows" attitude.

Yea, not as bad as it sounds at first.

The linux support was always kind of bad and now the route is free for a community build/fork. I understand it is already on its way, see http://talksongbird.com/node/19.

I think songbird is pretty out competed on the linux platform. There are a bunch of really great media players on linux, and songbird (the last time I looked at it) could not match them.

I don't get it, it isn't like they're trying to relicense the software or something, the point of OSS is that you are free to examine/enhance/use the software as you see fit. "Unsupported" software is really the norm as far as I'm concerned. As an Ubuntu user I've never used songbird as rhythmbox has always been "good enough" and amarok has been an interesting "upgrade".

I was just wondering the other day what ever happened to Songbird. It seemed to have a strong teem behind it and a lot of potential, but they don't seem to make much noise anymore.

It's ironic that I just installed Songbird to try it out. Oh well, it's no big loss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com