At work, I usually listen to an Internet radio stream from here or there (or even here), but sometimes I have a hankerin’ to play my own mp3s that I’ve downloaded from my collection at home or brought in my some other means. I don’t like iTunes or Windows Media Player, so it’s been something of an experimental journey to find a good alternative player.
I messed around for a while with Jajuk, a java-based, cross-platform media player. It wasn’t bad, but there were certain aspects of the GUI that I wasn’t very font of. Often, if I just wanted to listen to one specific album at a time, VLC did the job very effectively. But there were a few ‘CDs’ on which it was having trouble reading the tags. I didn’t have the time or interest to try to solve that problem.
I revisited Songbird instead. I’ve had it installed as a means of testing the ‘subscription’ functionality of our podcast. While the ‘bird still doesn’t seem to handle that feed the right way, the current 1.0.x version has come a long way from when the project was first announced (in Internet time, approximately a thousand years ago). I built a small “library” from the tunes I have on this harddrive, and one of the coolest things about the software (like any Gecko-based product) is the extensibility that you can get through plugins and add-ons. There seems to be a large and continually expanding array of options that you can tack on to your Songbird player; they’ve come on a lot faster than I expected. If you’re so inclined, give it a look. If I can get a “album shuffle” plugin, I would consider switching from Amarok at home…
K, I’m going to go back to listening to this record that I produced, back when I was a record producer…