Take the iPhone and Palm Pre for example, both have iTunes syncing, video and music playback, picture viewer as well as YouTube support. But owning a Pre and iPod Touch myself as well as using iPhone’s has taught me that a media player on a cellphone is more of a novelty for the music lover, rather than a necessity.

For one, there has yet to be a phone that lives up to the quality of music one would expect from an MP3 player. Just by doing a simple test with an iPhone vs. iPod Classic, Palm Pre vs. Zune or Sony Ericsson X! vs. Sony X-Series Walkman you will notice the difference not only in fidelity but also bass and range. For a casual person this might not be a biggie, but for those of us whose hard drives are stacked with albums it might be a difference like day and night.

Another problem with cell phones and music is functionality. Imagine a DJ carrying his iPhone to a party stacked with all the nights jam and half way through “Turn Me On,” he gets a ring from a friend who can’t find the parties location. While most of us are not DJ’s I’m sure those who dock their iPhone’s to their stereo system, no how frustrating it is when half way through the song someone calls, worse when it’s a telemarketer or some other person of shady character.

So yes, having a cellphone with an mp3 player is a nice novelty but for those who are concerned about battery life and music quality, it just cannot cut it. Thankfully technology is advancing and if we start seeing more phones with Snapdragon and Tegra processors, things might change. But for now, I’ll keep my mp3 player and cell phone as two separate devices thank you.

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I was looking at a player to connect to a DAAP server to centralize my home music collection. Songbird was the ticket. With that in mind I thought it might be good to illustrate how to use this player on Linux. Since most users here are Windows users, you are used to pointing and clicking an application into existence. With some Linux applications, this isn’t quite the case. Unlike most Linux applications, Songbird has yet to reach the repositories of the main distributions. Because of this you will have to download the application from the Songbird website and use the downloaded file.

Since Songbird is based on Firefox, it is used very similarly. The first thing you need to do is download the necessary file. You will find a link to the download from the main Songbird page. Once you have the file you will have to open up terminal window and change to the directory it was downloaded to. For simplicity sake let’s assume the file was downloaded to ~/Download/firefox/.

From within the terminal window issue the command:

cd ~/Download/firefox

Now move the file Songbird_XXX.tar.gz

Where XXX is the release and architecture of your file name.

Now change to your home directory with the command cd. Now you are ready to unpack the file. Run the command:

tar xvfz Songbird_XXX.tar.gz

which will result in a new directory ~/Songbird.

Figure 1

Within this new directory is everything you need run the application, which is done with the command ~/Songbird/songbird. It would be nice if you could create a link from the ~/Songbird/songbird to /usr/bin but this will not work. Instead what you need to do is create either a desktop or panel application launcher in order to open up Songbird. In GNOME you can create a panel launcher by right clicking the panel and selecting “Add to panel”.

The next step is to enter the details for the launcher. Here is what you’ll need:

• Type: Application
• Name: Songbird (This can actually be anything you want)
• Command: /home/USERNAME/Songbird/songbird NOTE: Where USERNAME is the actual user name. You must use the explicit path to the Songbird executable.
• Comment: Songbird Media Player (This can be anything you want)
• Icon: This will be located in /home/USERNAME/Songbird/chrome/icons/default/ Where USERNAME is the actual username. The icon name is default.xpm

Figure 2

For KDE 4 you actually have to add the Songbird entry to the menu. A launcher widget is planned for 4.2 but has yet to find its way into the repositories. To add Songbird to the menu  right click the Start Menu icon and select Menu Editor from the resulting menu.  In the window that opens you will want to add this menu entry to the Multimedia sub menu. Highlight the Multimedia entry and then click New Item. In the resulting General tab fill out the entries like you see in Figure 2. The only difference will be to make sure you use the explicit path to your Songbird executable. After you have filled everything out click the Save button. Now you will find Songbird in your KDE menu.

Final Thoughts

Songbird is really one of the more user-friendly audio/video management tools for any platform. If you are looking for a replacement for iTunes, that will allow you to work in any OS, Songbird should fit the bill.

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Not all media players come with that functionality though. Media Keyboard 2 is a software program that adds support for media keys in several media players that do not support those keys by design. The software adds media key support for the following applications: VLC Media Player, XMPlay, Winamp Classic, FreeAMP, 1by1, Xion and Zinf.

Media Keyboard adds support for the play, pause, stop, previous and next media keys in the listed applications. The software uses less than four Megabytes of computer memory while running and will run on all Windows operating systems from Windows 95 to Windows XP.

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