Songbird almost-0.2

I posted about Songbird when it was released back in February, but to be honest I’d sort of forgotten about it since then. A discussion of it popped on the Well today and I downloaded 0.2rc3 to take another look.

Lots of progress has been made. It imported my iTunes library (it takes just the metadata, not the audio) and it works well. It’s really a CPU hog, though. On my 1.67GHz PowerBook, xulrunner is taking 10-15% CPU when it’s silent, 25-40% when playing.

I’m still not sold on the embedded-web-browser features, which feel generally clunky. A major exception is the way it finds audio files embedded in pages and presents them as a mini-playlist at the bottom of the window. That’s very slick.