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What are Songbird's system requirements?

What system requirements does Songbird have for the various OS/platforms it supports?
 
indifferent I’m wondering if I need to upgrade
Inappropriate?
4 people have this question

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  • Inappropriate?

    Windows

    • Windows XP, Windows Vista


    Minimum Hardware:

    • 733 MHz Pentium III CPU (Recommended: 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or comparable)

    • At least 256 MB of physical RAM (Recommended: 512 MB)

    • At least 40 MB of available space on your hard drive

    • 16 bit sound card (Recommended: 32 bit Sound Card)

    • Speakers or headphones




    Linux

    Please note that Linux distributors may provide packages for your distribution which have different requirements.

    • Linux kernel - 2.2.14 or later with the following libraries or packages:
      • glibc 2.3.2 or later

      • XFree86-3.3.6 or later

      • gtk+2.0 or later

      • fontconfig (also known as xft)

      • libstdc++6



  • Songbird has been tested on Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu Dapper 6.06.


  • Minimum Hardware:

    • 233 MHz Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-III+ CPU (Recommended: 500 MHz or greater)

    • At least 64 MB of physical RAM (Recommended: 128 MB or greater)

    • At least 52 MB of available space on your hard drive

    • 16 bit sound card (Recommended: 32 bit sound card)

    • Speakers or headphones




    Mac

    • Mac OS X 10.4 or later


    Minimum Hardware:

    • Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or a PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor

    • At least 256 MB of physical RAM

    • At least 61 MB of available space on your hard drive




    Performance requirements will scale to the size of the user's library.
 
happy I’m a geek
Sprite_screen 1 person says this answers the question
  • JAMF
  • Comment_icon
    Sorry :/, We do our best to keep Songbird a cross-platform solution, but that means that our resources must be carefully managed. It's difficult for us to make a case for backward compatibility back to Win2k.
  • GFriday
    Inappropriate?
    One good case for backwards compatibility to W2K is that since iTunes dropped its support for it, older computers (such as the ones the kids, the ones with the iPods, inherit) don't allow them to sync their iPods. How can I justify upgrading an old machine to XP just so they can run iTunes? I came here looking for an alternative - guess I'll have to keep looking.
  • lebidou
    Inappropriate?
    I was looking for player that uses less memory than iTunes, songbird doesn't.
    I hope there will be improvements on this point in the future.

    I'll keep an eye on this bird for sure !
     
    sad I’m frustrated
  • benpol
    Inappropriate?
    Please update the system requirements for Linux. The current releases of Songbird require a very recent version of glibc (version 2.4 or greater).

    Unfortunately this means that the binary builds of Songbird no longer support the *current* Debian release (etch). etch's glibc is 2.3.6. Any chance we could get some Debian etch compatible builds?
     
    sad I’m frustrated
  • dmglouis
    Inappropriate?
    Actually, I just downloaded Songbird 0.6 on my Win2K machine and its working fine. I don't know about addons but it started up fine.
     
    happy I’m thankful
  • jake
    Inappropriate?
    Can we, as a culture, please cease referring to unix as "Linux?" It's unnecessary politically-motivated branding. This software, for instance, isn't "Linux only" as I'm typing this on my Songbird running on Solaris. Linux is a subset of unix. System requirements should say something like Microsoft version xx, unix version xx, Mac version xx (I guess the Mac-specific part is arguable too).

    thx
    jake
     
    happy I’m fine
  • Comment_icon
    Nitpicker ;-)
    ALL *nix derivates ARE publicly called Linux, by all but the geekiest Tech-savvy people... It has become like saying Jeep for all Offroad vehicles, or here in Germany "Tempo" (which too, is just a brand) for Handkerchiefs or like many people refer to "google something", when they want to say online search. I think, you got to live with that. It's too late to change, if you ask me...
  • Comment_icon
    The moment they start testing, developing, and making builds for BSD, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc, they'll start saying UNIX instead. As is, they develop for Linux, and if it happens to work anywhere else, that's a plus.
  • okohokonu
    Inappropriate?
    will there ever be a Mac OS 10.3 or lower version? Im running an Imac G3 so I cant upgrade to 10.4. Any thoughts?
     
    sad I’m frustrated
  • escoles
    Inappropriate?
    Current release does not support Macs with PPC processors. What's the plan on that?

    Also, could you change the system requirements to reflect the processor requirement on Macs?
     
    sad I’m frustrated
  • ben
    Inappropriate?
    just a comment. The Mac version is labeled "Mac OSX Intel" which is confusing because, according to your answer above, non-Intel Macs are okay, too.
    ......
    Update: cannot be installed on this system. OSX 10.4.11 Not sure why.
     
    sad
  • FarmerBob
  • Haus
  • Daniel Raffel
    Inappropriate?
    Windows

    • Windows XP, Windows Vista


    Minimum Hardware:

    • 733 MHz Pentium III CPU (Recommended: 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or comparable)

    • At least 256 MB of physical RAM (Recommended: 512 MB)

    • At least 40 MB of available space on your hard drive

    • 16 bit sound card (Recommended: 32 bit Sound Card)

    • Speakers or headphones



    Mac

    • Mac OS X 10.4 or later


    Minimum Hardware:

    • Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 processor

    • At least 512 MB of physical RAM

    • At least 200 MB of available space on your hard drive



    Linux
    The Songbird QA team has tested Songbird on Ubuntu 7.10 32-bit & 64-bit, and Fedora 8 32-bit. Please note that Linux distributors may provide packages for your distribution which have different requirements.

    • Linux kernel - 2.2.14 or later with the following libraries or packages:


      • glibc 2.3.2 or later

      • XFree86-3.3.6 or later

      • gtk+2.0 or later

      • fontconfig (also known as xft)

      • libstdc++6



    Minimum Hardware:

    • 233 MHz Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-III+ CPU (Recommended: 500 MHz or greater)

    • At least 64 MB of physical RAM (Recommended: 128 MB or greater)

    • At least 52 MB of available space on your hard drive

    • 16 bit sound card (Recommended: 32 bit sound card)

    • Speakers or headphones



    NOTE: Performance requirements will scale to the size of the user's library.
  • tm351
    Inappropriate?
    songbird's running very slow for me on macbook with 512MB ram and OS 10.5, got just under 13k tracks in the library, want to add another 35k stored elsewhere on my external hard drive. is the slowness due to the size of library then? i prefer this software to itunes but at the moment the freezing mid-track and whenever i try to do anything is kind of annoying...
     
    silly I’m unsure
  • Daniel Raffel
  • Dr Gaud
    Inappropriate?
    I only accept Songbird since it plays AAC files which the powers at Apple corp refuse iTunes to play.
    Only to find that the equivalent wont play on Mac OS X PPC or AMD architecture. Could you please make a Mac OS cross-platform version.
     
    sad I’m Frustrated!!!
  • dies70-144 captcha
    Inappropriate?
    Fedora 8? (*knock* *knock*) It's 2007 calling, and they want their distro back.
     
    sad I’m bummed that songbird ignoring linux
  • Comment_icon
    G'day,

    Part of the problem is that later versions of fedora add SELinux, which stops Songbird working. The only solution is to apparently recompile on Fedora 11/10 which fixes the problem (but you probably break compatibility with older distro's). Also, it requires the automated building tools to be updated.

    Technically though. (*Knock knock*) Its the world calling, they want a standard packaging format in linux (which has been agreed to by all major distro's), and a bigger standard set of libs. It might also be nice if they provided some backwards compatibility once in a while. In Windows 7, I can STILL play the game outpost, and that was designed for Windows 95. In Linux though, any backwards compatibility with applications is a coincidence. And even worse, distributions don't even provide an easy way for developers to know how the API are changing (they don't even have a centralised development centre).

    So whilst I do agree better linux support would be nice, Linux distro's need to be less stubborn and start standardising a bit! Because at the moment, Linux takes significantly longer then Windows or OSX to test (because you need to test different versions of the distro's, and different distro's too) and coupled with the small audience unfortunately lets linux down a bit.

    But thats just 100% my opinion, I'm community and am not hired by Songbird. But I actually think its a good idea for developers to boycott Linux until at the very least, the top few distro's select a common package format. All these various packaging formats waste everyone time. Combined, I'm betting the extra time spent jerking around with everyone repackaging everything (not even with any changes normally) could probably have been enough to rewrite Xorg (total speculation though, but if you see how many people are repackaging programs, you have to really wonder how much time gets wasted by the different distributions and developers).

    We third party developers don't stand up though, nothing will ever be done, and time will just keep getting wasted.
  • Ragnar
    Inappropriate?
    Player beautiful and comfortable, but very hungry for system resources. In the task manager I have more than 80 megabytes of memory occupied by this process.
     
    sad I’m Sorry for system resources
  • Martin
  • Comment_icon
    Thanks for pointing that out Martin. I removed the outdated replies from the "best answers" section at the top.
  • Inappropriate?
    G'day, actually, there is a link on the front page now, and the new link is:
    http://www.getsongbird.net/system-req...

    So probably not much point..
    Sprite_screen 1 person says this answers the question
  • Comment_icon
    I was actually suggesting that Daniel Raffel fix the link in his post to this question/thread. You have posted the correct link, which is almost as good.
  • Sprite_screen The company says this answers the question
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