SongBird is the mediaplayer that I would be using if I hadn't found J River Media Jukebox. In fact, if I had been just a few months late finding it, I might have stopped looking for media players altogether.

SongBird is a unique media player based on the firefox codebase. It's biggest claim to fame is the inbuilt web-browser and related functions it includes. It utilises the mozilla model of add-ons and skins which can be downloaded from within the player itself. These include everything from ad-blockers to lyrics downloaders. It can also connect to a variety of free (legal) music sites and allows you to download files.

This is the key feature that sets SongBird apart from other media players, and an advantage it holds even over Media Jukebox. If you visit a music blog in SongBird, a bar popups along the bottom listing all the media files that this site directly links to. Think of it as a pre-emptive version of firefox download manager. It prompts you to show you what you can download, letting you visit your fave music sites and pull down the new content with the greatest of ease. This could be a very useful feature, and it's something I'd love to be using regularly, but alas I'm fairly static in my music tastes these days. The more adventurous amongst you will like it.

SongBird is in beta (version 0.7) and the design has been overhauled from the last iteration. It's now much cleaner and clearer than before, and models itself on a sort of industrial version of iTunes. It's also a boatload faster, which is very important as one of the big drawbacks of the early versions was the sluggish feel to things and the tendency to crash.

It's not perfect, in that it lacks the custom views of JukeBox, it doesn't (to my knowledge) sync to any devices, and it's got no equaliser of any kind, although one is apparently in the pipeline. Having said that, it's a lot better than most of the media players out there, and it's still only in beta. Its also available to linux and OSX users, which Jukebox is not. This fact pushes it in to that growing mass of essential apps which are available cross platform.

If you're on linux or OSx, if for some reason you didn't like Media Jukebox, or if you're just curious, check out SongBird 0.7

Let me tell you a story.

One day, about a year and a half ago, I decided that winamp was no longer the media player for me. I needed something more – something better. I needed something that could catalog my vast collection of MP3s and let me visualise it in a better way. And other stuff.

It's probably that 'And other stuff' which almost killed me. I tried a whole boatload of media players – Winamp 3, Winamp 5, VLC, Media-Monkey, iTunes, Windows Media Player 9, 10 and 11, 1by1, Foobar2000, aTunes, MusicCube, Mp3toys, MusicMatch Jukebox – and none came close to satisfying my thirst for control of my media collection. Well that's not technically true. I was happy with foobar for about 2 months – but each one I tried I eventually tired of.  I even considered writing my own media player at one point, but before I could, I found J River Media Jukebox.

Initially, Jukebox had come up several times in searches, but I dismissed it based on the name. I figured J River sounded like a cheap knock-off of iRiver, and it was probably a spyware loaded piece of shit. I was so far wrong.

J River is, in a word, PERFECT. Everytime you think of some other feature it could have, you find that feature. It catalogs your entire music database, watches folders, manages portable devices, makes smart playlists (like 'most played', 'last listened','random 100 songs'), allows you to add shortcuts to things all over the place, includes a web-browser, does all kinds of DSP effects, Burns CDs, rips CDs, Converts audio formats, connects to last.fm, imports album art…

I could keep going, but you get the idea. It does everything you need, it does it cleanly, it does it well, and it does it fast.

But my favorite function of J River Media Jukebox is the 'View Schemes' it uses instead of folders. Basically, it allows you to add custom views to the side bar which auto sort/group your music by tag. So for instance, I have a view for disk location, one for keywords (so I can find all my soundtracks at once),  one for file-type, one for genre, and most importantly a combo one for album artist / album – this means it sorts by artist EXCEPT where the track is on an album with multiple artists – then it sorts it under (various). It might sound trivial, but its the exact kind of attention to detail which makes great software.

If you've ever been frustrated with the Winamps and iTunes of this world, I urge you to give Media Jukebox a try.

EDIT:

I had the wrong URL at the top there, it was linking to J River Media CENTER, which is a different product. There is a 30 day trial, but it’s not available for free like jukebox is (they have to make money somehow). The correct URL for jukebox (now fixed at the top of the post) is http://www.mediajukebox.com/