Adventures in iPodlessness

I love the iPod, but iTunes? Not so much. It's slow, increasingly bloated, and for some inexplicable reason, my iTunes library started fragging itself every 3-4 months this year. After my last mass extinction event, I said "ya basta" and made the switch to Songbird. It's been interesting.

Unfortunately Songbird hasn't had iPod support since version 1.2 (I'm running 1.10), so that meant using another device. I've always been opposed to having music on my phone because I could never carry a significant amount of it (and people who listen to music on phones are douches), but after deciding that maybe 16GB wouldn't be so bad, I decided to go for it and load my music onto my Droid RAZR.

The Gear: Songbird 1.10.2, Songbird for Android, Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx, SanDisk 16GB SD card

The Good:

Songbird's extensions and integration features are flippin' awesome. After adding my music to Songbird, I was able to sync my play counts with Last.fm directly (crucial for managing music on limited space), making migration a cool summer breeze. Hooray for data! I also added the Songkick add-on, which notifies you if an artist is playing near you soon. Another major like is that Songbird automatically looks for new music in your library folder. As far as managing your library on your computer it's very hassle-free.

You don't need the android Songbird to sync with Songbird on PC, but I recommend it. On the device end, the Android Songbird interface is much better than the standard android music player; its menus are more intuitive, and it features a lock screen widget that has play/pause and seek controls, which is a hell of a lot faster than unlocking your phone every time you want to skip a song. It also scrobbles to Last.fm in real-time(!) and lets you pull up a flickr stream for whatever artist you're currently listening to, which is kinda gimmicky but fun.

The Bad:

Songbird's sync capability, at least with Android devices, suuuuuuucksss. I plugged in my RAZR expecting to be able to sync selected playlists like in iTunes, but only the stock smart playlists were available for that. But oh! I discovered, you can click and drag playlists to your device! That'll do it. That'll get your songs onto the SD card, but it doesn't properly sync; it only adds missing files on top of what's there, without deleting anything. Eventually I had to download a folder sync add-on to sync my custom management playlists, which is pretty pathetic, and even that has sync errors.

As for the phone/app, I have some minor gripes that are fixable. The scrolling motion in Songbird is hypersensitive and makes choosing artists harder than it should be. And I miss hardware buttons, but this is a problem with any touch-screen phone. As with all Motorola droid phones, the volume intervals are stupidly wide, letting me choose between "a little too quiet" and "significantly too loud." A continuous volume slider in Songbird would be a nice touch; strangely that's missing.

The Verdict:

Overall, the experience of switching from iTunes/Pod to Songbird and Android has been better than I expected; I thought I'd be running back to my iPod and trying to put Linux on it, but I'm actually kind of liking this. 16GB of space for a 65GB library isn't much, but it's surprisingly livable, and can easily be remedied by just buying a 32GB SD card from Newegg. Songbird has some major shortcomings, but it also has some really nice features, and because it's open-source there will hopefully be more. I'm even contemplating writing my own "smarter playlists" add-on that'll let you do playlists for most-listened albums and artists so you can keep albums intact.