Lightweight and quicker songbird

In my view the lighter something is, the better (Excpet maybe gold, you can give me heavy gold over lighter gold any day). Good code is inexpensive in system resources and produces fast, efficient dependable applications. The more code, the more complexe, the more error prone...the worse off stuff starts to become. Songbird is the Windows vista of media players. Its got tons of options (maybe even some bloat) but its not lightweight, or quick at all, and its very resource hungry. We need to put our bird on a diet.

Lets take winamp and songbird and compare them using the same 6700+ song library. First in memory consumption:

Songbird: 106 Megs
Songbird (Miniplayer): 86 Megs
Winamp Big Bento: 66.23 Megs
Winamp Classic: 22 Megs

in one word: Yikes!

Lets talk start-up (running a winXP Core2Duo clocked @ 1.87ghz and 1Gb of DDR 667 ram desktop). I counted how many times i could say Mississippi before the app appeared up and functional. I didn't say numbers; I counted the words using my hand, and if the app completed in between the 'mississippi' i broke it into 4 parts (mis sis sip pi) and counted fractions. I took timed 3 warm starts, and the app was allowed a start before I started timing it.

Songbird: 6.75
Songbird (mini player): 3.25
Winamp Big Bento: 2.25
Winamp Classic: 0.75

While not the most scientific time measurement... its pretty accurate.

We need to set goals to make songbird this competitive. Even if songbird has all the features winamp does (and it doesn't) nobody wants a vista like media player: slow, clunky and... ....slow.

This should be one of our higher priorities people... not just form and functions... heres a real world exampe: Firefox and chrome. Firefox is now starting to appear unattractive to users because of the dramatic start-up speed chrome has. Firefox 3.6 is main focus is performance... The highest priority items are 1) Faster start-up speed, Faster internals (like launching a new tab), and fast awesome bar queries. 2) Lightweight add-ons and themes (memory and start-up related). and to be able to install add-ons without a restart (less time waiting for firefox, more browsing)... thats skinny on the namoroka outline!

all im saying is we can and should do better.