And hitting live acts can be challenging as your schedule becomes more and more crowded. With the likes of Clear Channel rampaging through the radio industry and imposing its own brand of agenda driven homogeneity on listeners, it can be difficult to find new music over the airwaves these days. Most of the serious music fans I know are always on the prowl for new music. So while I’m still wedded to iTunes for my iPod, Songbird is my player of choice for most everything else.Īnd before you ask, James, yes Songbird does support Last.fm and thus population of your dorktunes library.
It also handles music streaming – like WOXY’s – with aplomb. It handles the basics – media playback and so on – just fine, and offers some intriguing features that iTunes does not, such as the ability to input any URI containing embedded media and automatically download it to your library. But I’m actually quite happy with it after a month or two of moderately heavy usage. Let’s start with what Songbird is not: a.) perfect, b.) polished, c.) able to handle devices like my iPod, and d.) stable. It’s unfortunate, but the price of liberty and so on. I still haven’t gotten around to buying the new Beck or Thom Yorke albums because of my individual iTunes boycott. Is it cutting into my listening habits? Yes. Throw in the fact that the Fairplay de-DRMification software based DVD Jon’s work is not able to crack 6 or 7 DRM yet, and the decision’s even easier.
But I’m really trying to not pour any more money into the store component, because I lose the ability to play the music I’ve purchased on multiple platforms. On the aforementioned Windows machine, I’m still an iTunes The Player user, because it’s a very fine piece of software (the horrendous 7.0 bugs notwithstanding). Yes, you can burn the tracks onto CD’s, but when you have as I do better than a thousand tracks purchased through the service that’s not a particularly attractive solution.īut since all of my machines with one exception are non-Windows (with no Apples), Apple’s DRM is increasingly inconvenient. I was never ecstatic about buying iTunes’ DRM’d tracks, because in buying those you’re also essentially committing to Apple’s platform – perpetually. It’s too early to draw any firm conclusions about what this means for me, but I figured that those of you who are into music might either learn something or have some suggestions for me. Over the past month or two, some of my music habits have shifted significantly – and perhaps permanently.
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