Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Songbird add-on to use Ubuntu notifications

In a previous post, we saw 3 add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird that allowed them to use Ubuntu or KDE notification system, so they would integrate much better with the OS. There is a similar add-on available for the geat media player Songbird too!
It can display title/artist/album name/genre/rating (any metadata actually and in any order you like) and the album cover!
You can find ubuntu-notifyOSD here.




Rant: Why Songbird is still not in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories (PPA is not a good solution, it should be in the real repositories) is beyond my comprehension and probably beyond any (un)reasonable explanation. It can't be that hard for the Ubuntu, Debian & Songbird developers to package it, can it???

Rant update!!!!!
As if absence form repositories was not enough, Songbird team announced that they are droping official support for Linux!!!!! Community builds will keep coming for anyone who still cares to use it. Maybe Songbird on Linux was doomed from the beginning with most KDE distros shipping with Amarok and Ubuntu and many others with Rythmbox. But this is a really lame excuse, as many other programs thrive, despite not being the default ones. The biggest reason for its failure was not ever really trying to provide packages for the most popular distributions and using the system theme to integrate better with the OS.


So, as my favorite Southpark character Cartman would say:

Where "home" would be the preinstalled Rythmbox.

3 comments:

rokytnji said...

I read about the dropped Linux support also L4. I was running Songbird last year but switched to Exhaile later when I found out about it.

Bunch of PO"d folks about Songbirds decision. Some other folks in France are trying to build on Songbird with a fork of their own. Can't remember the exact name but it is akin to a nightingale or something like that.

I find that streamtuner tied in with Xmms in AntiX is killer for capturing live radio streams and Exhaile works fine for my RCA Mp3 player (which is very Linux friendly by the way). And guess who probably built my Mp3 player. Probably Philips. LOL

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