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Songbird – the magpie of media players

Posted on | March 11, 2009 | 2 Comments

At work, I like to listen to music. It allows me to focus on the task in hand. I plug my iPod 5G into my computer and up until recently I was using Winamp to access and play the mp3s on there.

However, on Monday of this week I decided to try something new. I’d heard about Songbird and found that I could use it to play music off my iPod, so I downloaded and installed it and all was good. It played the music I wanted to play, it could read my iPod and play stuff from that including my playlists.

However, the one thing I hadn’t done was to sync the library in Songbird with my iPod as I had a few songs in Songbird that I had recently bought and so were on my computer at work. It had asked me when I first installed it if I wanted to, and warned me that I might lose songs from my iPod. I therefore declined.

Then, this afternoon I read that there was a new version available (1.1 for those interested). Since the software could quite happily update itself without me installing anything I just let it do its thing. It asked if I wanted to update any add-ons (it’s written using some Mozilla libraries so there are a few add-ons and themes, not unlike firefox) so I agredd to these.

Once the installation was complete and the software had restarted I was amazed to see that all that was in the library was those very songs that I had on my computer. “Fine” I thought. “It just hasn’t picked up my iPod yet.” So I unplugged my iPod and plugged it back in again. No joy. “Maybe there’s a problem with reading my iPod. Let’s just see what’s actually on the iPod itself… ” So I looked. Those same few songs. 

Thank you Songbird, for deleting my music. Luckily I have copies at home. And I have Last.FM for now. 

Say what you like about Winamp, at least it doesn’t delete my music.

Oh, and I’ve uninstalled Songbird now.

Category: Blog, Tech

Comments

2 Responses to “Songbird – the magpie of media players”

  1. Songbird issues with iPod part the second | piersonthe.net
    March 17th, 2009 @ 11:19 am

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  2. Songbird fixed - worth another look? | piersonthe.net
    March 20th, 2009 @ 11:47 am

    [...] Songbird – the magpie of media players [...]

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