Jozer99's dashboard

Jozer99 here, (if you look waaaaay up at the top, I started this thread). I tried out version 1.0, and I am happy to report I am at last relatively satisfied with the RAM usage. Its still a bit high (165MB), but at least it remains stable enough to use for a couple of hours. Of course, there are still plenty of other bugs out there.

Chad, please remember that Songbird is in fact a browser with an MP3 player attached; Firefox. Demanding that it switch to the other way around seems a bit unrealistic.

AlucardNoir: Read first post in thread.

Moderator: Can we close this thread somehow? Topic is getting farther and farther away from original topic, and less and less civil.

I do use iTunes. But I don't want too. Even on my quad core system, iTunes is slow as molasses. Even worse, iTunes occasionally deletes a few of my songs randomly (and permanently). Plus, every couple of weeks, iTunes keeps trying to install a bunch of software I don't want onto my system (Safari, MobileMe). I guess you are unfamiliar with the idea of feedback, but that was the whole point of this thread (and, in fact, this entire site; getsatisfaction.com). Developers need to know what their audience wants, especially for open source projects like songbird. And, if you will be kind enough as to read the first several posts, you will see that the point of this thread is NOT to criticize the direction of the project, or the developers, but instead to report a bug that causes excess memory usage.

If you want an integrated browser, there are already MP3 plugins for Firefox that give you a full featured browser with lightweight media abilities that use way less system resources than Songbird (see Amazing Media Browser plugin, for instance). Songbird, with its extensive library features, MP3 player syncing, visualization, search, and media oriented GUI is clearly intended to be more MP3 player than browser. I have no problem with a web browser being integrated (as it is with Winamp or iTunes), but I was simply suggesting flushing the browser components from memory when not in use (this thread is about memory use, after all).

Right. But WHY does songbird have a full featured browser in it? I understand that having a browser to explore music sites is handy, but do I really need the ability to play flash games at Yahoo in my MP3 player? And why do the browser components need to run all the time? Since 95% of the time, I am only using the library page, couldn't the browser components be closed down and taken out of memory until I open a new browser tab?

Those numbers sound pretty much identical to mine. Its pretty easy to see that Songbird has a problem with memory usage. I still fail to see why songbird should be EXPECTED to use more memory than iTunes. iTunes integrates parallel features to everything in Songbird, and more (music player, movie player, browser, music organization, various display modes and visualizers). If anything Songbird should be expected to use LESS memory than iTunes, as apple has a history of writing bloated software. Winamp manages to do EVERYTHING iTunes does with a lower memory footprint. I still hold out hopes for this.

I was comparing to iTunes because iTunes also includes a browser (however, not one that can access any url's outside of apple.com, but a browser non-the-less. Winamp can also display HTML pages in certain windows. Not using foobar2000, I haven't used it much, so I can't comment on its HTML rendering skills, or lack thereof.

Songbird is very similar to firefox, correct? Since this is the case, then perhaps a good baseline for performance would be Firefox's memory usage. This is also well under 100MB for a fresh browser window, and doesn't climb several MB per minute even when not doing anything. As such, it is pretty obvious that the memory issues are due to your code, not the mozilla base code.

I understand that 0.7 just came out, but I really like the idea of Songbird, and am anxious to use it full time. As of the current release, it is just too much of a resource hog for day to day use, so I am counting down the days until it is!

Thanks for everyone's replies! My library is about 9000 songs. Since the features and GUI of Songbird are comparable to that of iTunes, I will grudgingly be satisfied if Songbird is able to run with the same RAM usage as iTunes with the same library (about 75-80MB after several hours of use). However, if you guys can beat iTunes (which is a resource hog for its functionality), I would be ecstatic. For instance, Winamp or foobar2000 are both able to provide similar functionality with much lower memory usage (but with inferior GUI's).

I actually can't complain about processor usage. 0.6 was terrible, using 25% of my quad core system at all times (i.e. 100% of an entire core). 0.7 seems much better, on par with iTunes (2-3% of processor while playing, quite a bit more during the initial indexing). Plus, Songbird just FEELs much more responsive than iTunes does, the searches seem faster, clicking on a playlist doesn't have lag, all of these are better even than iTunes, let alone 0.6.

Thanks again for your quick replies, and for your hard work in making Songbird! By the way, what is the ETA for 0.8, or whatever release will start making major steps toward better memory management?