Songbird was mentioned here awhile ago and I decided to check it out to see how it stands up to iTunes.
I'm not here to talk about anything other than iTunes vs. Songbird. Do not bring any other players into this conversation, please.
Anyway, I've been a long-time iTunes user because it has an awesome way of managing songs, importing songs and sorting features. Basically, it has a lot of smaller things I like that a lot of other players don't have. Well, Songbird is intending to be an iTunes replacement, so I decided to put the two side-by-side and see how they compare to each other.
These are the two versions I'm using:
iTunes 7.5.0.20
Songbird v0.4rc2
iTunes takes up roughly 65.3mb disk space.
Songbird takes up roughly 48.9mb disk space.
The iTunes Library files totaled 25.6mb. 11.8mb for the .itl file and 13.7mb for the .xml. The downloaded artwork totaled 165mb.
The Songbird Library file totaled 59.0mb. That's pretty huge compared to both the .itl file and .xml file (which are actually mirrors of each other, one in a database format and the other in xml format.) The Songbird Library file is all contained in a database of its own using SQLite. The extensions totalled 4.27mb.
All in all, iTunes actually takes up less space than Songbird if you exclude the downloaded album artwork.
Now onto actual usage of the app.
A few things I noticed right away was that iTunes was far more snappy and responsive. I can grab the scrollbar and drag it down towards the end of my list and iTunes always updates me and shows me the tracks. I did the same in Songbird and was greeted with nothing. I could double click on where a track might be, and it would play it, but I wouldn't actually be able to see any of the track information.
Memory and CPU usage of Songbird were both higher than iTunes. iTunes sat at around 71mb for me. Songbird sat at about 80mb of memory. CPU usage of iTunes during playback was 0-1% while Songbird would maintain a 1% minimum and jump up to 2-3%. Both differences are quite minimal.
Main interfaces:
Actual editing of track information in iTunes provided a lot more options and functionality. The tabs made browsing through the separate things pretty straight forward and simple. In Songbird, they were all cluttered together with a scrollbar to search through and set everything. Editing single track information seemed pretty non-existent in Songbird, I could only set immediate track information straight from the list itself.
Single file edit dialogs (Songbird doesn't have one):
Group file edit dialog(s):
The options dialogs were pretty similar to the editing above. iTunes were all separated in a very easy-to-use manner and things were straightforward and simple to find. The default, black dialogs of Songbird and messy options dialogs made it a bare to look through to change settings and so on.
iTunes options dialogs:
Songbird options dialogs:
As for features between the two, by default, iTunes has far more features and operates much more efficiently, all in a smaller size, and smaller footprint. iTunes also can manage your files for you. For example, I simply drag a song onto iTunes, and it will automatically move it over to the Music folder I choose and will put it in an Artist and Album directory, plus rename the song. Any time you modify the name of the song, artist or album, it will automatically rename the directories and filename to match. I never have to touch the files myself. Songbird doesn't have this functionality at all.
Now, Songbird has all kinds of add-ons, themes, etc. that you can use to add more functionality, but these all take up even more space, CPU and memory. I loaded up some album art manager and it instantly jumped Songbird up to 250mb of memory usage.
The reason I am not going into detail on any of the add-ons or themes is because iTunes also has third-party programs that people make that you can use to change themes and add more features.
So in closing thoughts, I am not ready to move from iTunes to Songbird any time soon. There are just few too features and problems to be a full-time replacement. It definitely has the potential to be something great, but it's not great yet.
