After careful consideration, we’ve (the Songbird Team) come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird.
Source: Songbird Blog
Songbird and Rhythmbox are both free and open source audio players using the GStreamer media framework. Songbird utilizes the cross-platform framework XUL Runner thus capable of running on most operation systems while Rhythmbox is designed to run well under the GNOME Desktop (A desktop enviorment that can be used with various Unix-like operating systems). I will only cover a few things in this review.
Extensibility
Can you extend it? Can you theme it? Can you easily write a “extension” yourself? Thats the question!
Songbird
Songbird is extensible with add-ons and themes (Feathers). Songbird inherited Mozilla’s add-on architecture. All you need to know to write your own extension is some JavaScript and you need to get used to the XUL markup language.
With the current amount of add-ons and themes available Songbird is one of the most extensible media players around.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is extensible with plugins only. They have official plugins and third party plugins. Plugins for Rhythmbox can be written in C and Python. Plugins written in Python are generally easier to write and maintain. Writing plugins in Python does have limitations.
Rhythmbox has far less plugins then Songbird listed on their website but there are plenty of plugins available in the wild.
Speed
I have not used a benchmark tool to actually test the performance of both applications, the “results” are just my personal opinion. I have used both applications with preload enabled.
Songbird
Songbird isn’t the fastest media player out there, to be honest it’s as fast as a snail.. It takes a while before it has been rendered and loading your playlist isn’t that fast either (especially with a large music collection). Installing a few add-ons like MediaFlow doesn’t make it any better. But there is hope, improving the application performance is on their roadmap.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is a pretty fast media player. It only takes a second or two before you can play a song and browse your music collection. Installing plugins doesn’t affect this at all. To make it even faster you could use a special script that “optimizes” the XML files used by Rhythmbox although there is no benchmark data available to backup this statement.
Playback
Basically Songbird and Rhythmbox play exactly those formats that are supported by GStreamer. GStreamer uses a plugin system where each format is supported by a plugin. In other words if you are a developer and the format you use is not available as a plugin you could write a plugin yourself to make it support the format.
Unlike Rhythmbox Songbird 1.5 will support video playback. It will be able to play most WMV, MPEG-4, Theora, and H.264 video files although video support is pretty basic and will be improved in the 1.6 release.
CD’s
Is it able to play a CD? Can it rip a CD to your machine?
Songbird
Songbird does allow you to rip CD’s to your machine, in fact it does want you to do so! Playing CD’s is deliberately not supported because they (read: the team behing Songbird) think it’s better to just rip your CD to your machine instead of switching your CD’s all the time. One bad thing about it: CD ripping does not work yet under Linux but Songbird does use the GEARWorks library. This library does support Linux so basically it is a matter of doing the coding and the tests.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is able to play, rip and burn CD’s out of the box! There is nothing else to write about..
Conclusion
As you can see there is no real winner here, both media players are great and have their shortcomings. I myself currently use Rhythmbox because it is much faster then Songbird (and I like fast applications) but I do have used Songbird for a long time on both Windows and Linux and I really liked it and I’m sure that I will switch back once the application performance has been increased (the latest nightly build should be a lot faster according to a few people I spoke).
I thank AndrewLuecke and db48x from the awesome Songbird IRC channel for answering a few of my questions.
What is your favorite music player for Linux and why?