It’s no surprise that I’m an Apple fan. Perhaps a fanatic. And I’ve been that way for ages. I’ve been a happy iPod owner for around 8 years now (I owned an iPod before I owned a Mac, and this was in the days before iPods were fully supported on Windows). I’ve been making music on Macs since 2002. But there is still one gigantic sore spot in the Mac and music world: iTunes.

I would hope I don’t have to explain this point, but it turns out many people love iTunes, and I understand why. Apple didn’t force its way to the top of digital music world by accident. They came up with a well engineered, well marketed, and well designed system for distribution and playback, and iTunes lived at the core. But as time rolled on, iTunes became bloated, slow, full of features that I either didn’t need or only used sparingly enough that it didn’t make sense for me to have them. And so I began searching for other options, but found nothing, until recently.

I had tried Songbird before, back in the pre-1.0 days, and thought it had a lot of promise, but couldn’t stand the many bugs that kept me from really enjoying it. So when 1.0 came out a few months back, I couldn’t help but get excited. And I was not disappointed.

Let’s consider speed. iTunes relies entirely on a flat-file database that stores all of the metadata about your music. You’d think this would work well, and in fact it does for small music libraries (average users have numbers in the 100s or 1000s). But for me (I have some 75000 tracks), iTunes was slow and unresponsive. Search – a feature of the utmost importance – was painful, often beachballing. With Songbird, it’s quick and easy. And the shortcut keys are the same as Firefox (more on this later). What’s more, the search bar can be used to see a host of other searches on a variety of websites.

Now let’s talk about Songbird’s most “featured feature,” the ability to play the web. See, Songbird is actually built on Firefox, which means you’ve got a browser built into your music player. If you open a webpage with embedded mp3 files, Songbird automatically detects them and shows them in a separate pane.

The pane functionality also allows you to install a whole bunch of incredible open source plugins to do everything from download cover art, read lyrics, display reviews and images, and even find related YouTube videos. One of my favorite plugins scans your music library, and cross-references with concerts in your city to find out who’s playing. Check out this fully decked out screenshot:

Of course, as with any 1.0 release, there are a lot of things missing from Songbird, or things that don’t work well at all. For starters, iPod support is limited. I’ll probably continue to use iTunes to manage that for a while. Songbird also doesn’t download from the iTunes Music Store (though I don’t care too much, since I hate AAC format). And my biggest gripe is that it doesn’t yet integrate with Quicksilver, though I have faith that some ambitious individual will fix this problem soon.

Give Songbird a try. I did, and I’m glad.