Most people use ITunes to sync tracks with their IPods. But installing ITunes is a tedious job and even after that it uses loads of CPU as well as memory and slows down everything. Besides that It installs QuickTime when you do not want it to and demands QuickTime rather than running with QuickTime alternative.
This has made many users who do not want to install QuickTime unhappy, but now there is a alternative. It has been here for a while but only a few know about it. Its Songbird an ITunes look alike media player with superb IPod sync capabilities, very good playback quality, very fast, doesn’t need you to install QuickTime and uses a lot less CPU than ITunes.
When you consider its interface it is not much different from ITunes so it will be easier for those of you to switch to it. Simply said, its a Customized Firefox browser with superb playback functions and a skin, so it doesn’t need any file associations or anything to be installed other than that. Checkout the screenshots to see what I mean.
The Screenshots:
Customize the player to the maximum by visiting the extensions site whilst in the player using the bookmarks given on the left panel. or simply go to this page to just browse through them.
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/
Pros & Cons:
Pros:
- Superb music quality equaling or even surpassing WinAmp the bass is excellent.
- Easy to use and very user friendly.
- Less CPU usage.
- Superb Shout cast radio Quality.
- Various Built in Services like Last.FM scrobbler.
- Nice community, but it needs to grow.
Cons:
- No equalizer.
- The memory foot print can come down coz it takes around 103MB. Its ok in my system as I have 2GB RAM but saying that it doesn’t slow the computer like ITunes.
Enough, now its time for you to try out, don’t worry it never messes your system like an ITunes, and its completely clean and I absolutely love it. I wish it grows into a lovely player. I wish the Songbird development team all the very best in their future endeavors.
I truly believe this will do to the Media Player what Firefox did to the Browsers.
View the Roadmap (New Features Planned for Future Releases) Here
Contribute to Songbird Community in Beta Testing and Giving Feedback
Have you ever considered MediaMonkey? It uses far less memory (on the moment it uses 9MB on my pc while playing a song with the window minimized and around 20-30MB when I’m working in it) and its CPU percentage is also very low (I think even less than Songbird). It has a lot of plugins and skins to customize the player and it doesn’t need QuickTime neither.
@Cedric:
yes indeed cedric, you are right, Media monkey is far better than this. Nice Find
yes media monkey is good, but it has a bad habit of screwing up the ipod touch music library