mozilla songbird – a first look

Version 0.4 (developer edition) of Mozilla’s new integrated media browser is out so I decided to take it for a spin through my music collection to see how it is coming along.

The immediately obvious likeness to firefox means that the interface and options are intuitive, but also means that it can easily become a memory hog. I observed it around hovering close to 200 MB’s at times and this was very noticeable in sluggish performance overall. If you can get over the performance of a slug, the application gives hope of a nice integrated media player and web browser which suits me fine – as these are my primary apps on my media centric workstation.

The slick mozilla look aside, Songbird 0.4 is missing too many of the features I find essential for day to day media playback like auto playlists, and even built-in playlists like “Recently Added”. I have no doubt these will come but at present Songbird falls well short of my expectations for an all encompassing media player. Songbird seems to hover dangerously close to a “Marketable Model” with tight integration to internet provided [sponsored?] content which gives me a bit of a chill being as this is Mozilla and not Apple… times are a changing.

Stil take it for a test drive yourself and see how you like it. I’m going to add it to my watch list – but won’t be making the transition from Media Monkey in the foreseeable future.

linkage: download songbird developer edition

review: torq xponent dj system on clevo D990k mobile desktop

A friend was visiting a few weeks ago and brought in his M-audio Torq Xponent in for me to have a mix on. I enjoyed my self so much over the next 24 hours that I went and got myself one.

I had been having some problems with my existing system a M-Audio external Audiophile sound card and Virtual DJ software. The Audiophile sound card with ASIO drivers crashed way too often to be performance worthy. The pitch would drop and the sound would start distorting, usually as a second track was added to a mix.

The Xponent includes a two channel sound card so I wouldn’t have to worry about using the crappy on board Ac97 sound card for the headphone channelas an added bonus of upgrading.

Having had the system for a couple of weeks now using the included Torq mixing software I have been pretty happy with the results. The Torq software still seems to have a few problems and has crashed a number of times, which is a few times too many. The software is a year on and up to V1.04 so they are addressing problems – but more to resolve. I don’t have 100% confidence to play live with it at this point in time, but I hope that will change by the next version.

I have set up a dedicated 3 GB partition on my mobile desktop, a Clevo D900k, with WinXP SP 2 and all Windoze updates installed. The partition is on a striped RAID array for optimal performance. Base system drivers installed ie. RAID, AMD processor management, as well as WiFi for Windoze updates. All unnecessary Windows components have been uninstalled and I have disabled any service (see this post) that isn’t going to be required. There are a lot that you do not need for DJ’ing and diasbling them can give any computer a performance boost.