Performance: Will Songbird really do what it takes to become competitive?

Let me start by saying that I work in the radio/music industry and have evaluated music media players for a number of years. I follow the latest trends and have a good idea of what consumers are looking for.

I really want to love Songbird. I've tried every single release. I think the design group is excellent. They know the proper way to develop the UI and it looks better than anything else currently out there.

However, performance is still a show stopper for me. You have made great progress in the latest version, but it's still not usable for a library more than 40,000 titles. I have a very fast system with the latest hardware. The slowness of scrolling, the hesitation when loading, the freezing of the UI for seconds on end makes it impossible to seriously use. The amount of memory the program uses with large libraries is simply unacceptable.

On the other hand, I wanted to hate Media Monkey. I hated the UI and "look" but in terms of performance and features, that is the best music player out there. You can now skin Media Monkey to look much better, even identical to Songbird. (There is even a Songbird skin) Media Monkey also has refined basic features that are not in Songbird yet.

With storage expanding quickly and serious music collectors growing their libraries to large amounts, I really in my heart feel for Songbird to become a player in the space, a long look needs to be taken on how to manage large libraries - where 100,000 songs won't bog the software down.

If Songbird wants to truly be a next generation player - they need to address what the next generation means. I realize that the next generation includes easily playing web material - which your software does a great jobe with, but the basics need to addressed FIRST. To me, a basic for the next generation includes being able to handle large libraries without any issue. This could be a big shift for the team who already has history using code in a certain type of database structure - but maybe throwing it out and starting from scratch is the right thing to do. I mean, is there an excuse to perform worse than Winamp who's development team has been gutted by AOL and is no longer aggressively being improved? How has Media Monkey been able to handle 100,000 tracks or more without any issues? The technology is out there. iTunes even does a better job handling large libraries. It might take 4 minutes to load it - but once it's there are no issues.

Again, I am on your side...I want to see Songbird become a major player.

At the end of the day, great progress was made - but handling 60,000 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 and even 100,000 songs without a problem is where the future is heading. I also think that a Now Playing screen is a basic component of a media player. (I know there is an add-on for this, but that seems to be something that is essential without having to use plug-in)

I don't want to take anything away from the hard work of the talented folks behind Songbird. I know they work long hours every day to make it a great program. I resisted sending this, but I appreciate honest feedback in my business - and I've been known to completely change how I think on a subject and make very difficult changes based on doing what is the "right thing to do."

I read that performance will be an ongoing challenge in future beta's, but I just want the team to examine if something as essential as performance is going to be signifigantly improved by just "working on it." Or rethinking that part of the code dealing with the libary as part for a large shift if really the right thing to do long term.

I want the future of Songbird to be bright! I am just concerned that if basics are not really fixed - by the time you get to a general public release, it will already be dated.

Thank you for listening.
Nick Roberts