An Unprepared Review of Songbird and Justification for iTunes

Ok, so I have been excited about iTunes since I got my first iPod when I was in Grade 10 high school in 2003. I was ready for a change after using Windows Media Player for much of my life. I started with version 5 when we got our brand new Windows ME machine where this new Media Player skin was considered a major upgrade from what was available to users since '98.


Ooooh, visualizations. That was what won me over. Anyway, here I am, 5 years of iTunes, a collection devastation twice, requiring a full reconstruction and a few iPods. Here I am yearning for a change. There is nothing technically wrong with iTunes. There are some very minor usability issues: It doesn't like FLAC or ORG file formats and more often than not I am using MP3's to keep things simple, but as time goes on I am wanting to start encoding in a more robust compression since hard drives drop in price by the second.

Songbird was the first choice.
It only takes a very small issue with technical reliability to put me off of thinking the advantages are superior.
1) The time-bar doesn't work for some songs.
2) I can't rely on doubleclick song starts from the library.
3) Album artwork is a slow process, with my hardware configuration I can mass write id3 tags much faster using iTunes.

I just installed iTunes, not looking back.
There are add-ins for iTunes that solve these problems. Open source can't win here.