I don’t get a lot of time to just sit and listen to music.  I live with my sister who has a penchant for spending inordinate amounts of time in front of the television.  And I spend about 10-12 hours a day at the office.  I don’t have a lot of quiet time.

But today Lisa is out of town.  And I’ve got a quiet house all to myself.  So for 3.7 hours I sat and listened to tunes.  Some I’d heard before, some I hadn’t.  I threw together this bizarro playlist one track at a time, and refused to skip any of them.  It was perfect for the work I was doing, just pulling data for a future blog post.  Here it is, in all its Spotified glory.

Animal Collective – My Girls
Black Moth Super Rainbow – Vietcaterpillar
Brad Paisley – American Saturday Night
John Lee Hooker – Boom Boom
Sam Sparro – Black and Gold
The Smiths – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
Lupe Fiasco – The Coolest
The Kinks – Johnny Thunder – Mono Version
The Flaming Lips – Everything’s Explodin’
Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart
Regina Spektor – Folding Chair
Squarepusher – Plate Core
Battles – Atlas
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone – Northfield, MN
The Lonely Island – I’m On A Boat
John Mayer – I’m Gonna Find Another You – Live at the Nokia Theatre
Finntroll – Jaktens tid
John Coltrane – Countdown – LP Version
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – Free Fallin’
Jay-Z – Empire State Of Mind [Jay-Z + Alicia Keys] – Explicit Album Version
The Notorious B.I.G. – Hypnotize
Buddy Guy – Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues
Junior Wells – Come On In This House
The Pogues – Fairytale of New York
Duke Ellington – New York, New York
R.E.M. – Leaving New York
Kiss – New York Groove
Enslaved – Clouds
Dropkick Murphys – I’m Shipping Up to Boston
Matthew Herbert – Something Isn’t Right
Phish – Farmhouse
Kittie – Kingdom Come
Low – Violence
Kittie – My Plague
Phish – Birds Of A Feather
Paulie Rhyme – Lost One Prod By Dj Deetalx Of Oddjobs
Nelly Furtado – I’m Like A Bird
Michael Bublé (With Nelly Furtado) – Quando, Quando, Quando (feat. Nelly Furtado)
Nat King Cole – Quizas Quizas Quizas
Mastodon – Sleeping Giant
Sly & The Family Stone – You Can Make It If You Try
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
My Chemical Romance – I’m Not Okay (I Promise)
Ennio Morricone – L’Estasi Dell’oro (The Ecstasy Of Gold)
Stanley Clarke – I Just Want to Be Your Brother
Devo – Jocko Homo
Dr. Dog – The Breeze
The Format – Matches
The Format – I’m Actual
The Doors – Riders on the Storm
Grateful Dead – Bertha [Live At Winterland Arena, San Francisco, CA, December 29, 1977]
Iron & Wine – Resurrection Fern
Skillet – Hero
Gwar – Timè fôr Deäth

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.