On the Mac, it's set so that left-and-right scrolling becomes up-and-down scrolling. That's ugly, because I often scroll top-right to down-bottom, and Songbird stutters something ugly when I do that.
The display controls are unintuitive. It took be a while to figure out how to control the browser.
The controls don't sync to my Play button. iTunes starts up. Yech.
I don't know how I'd test its speed compared to iTunes. But if I close it, the music stops. It doesn't know to make itself a background process. Yech.
It shows my movies and TV shows as songs. It doesn't know enough even to ignore it.
I do like how they made their interface deliberately un-Maclike, unlike Firefox, which tries and fails horribly. But I don't like that they ignore Mac shortcut schemes.
When people are looking to see if they will want a piece of software, the best indicator of if you'll want it is whether or not you can stand the negatives. And HN's a big enough place where I think the developers might look at this post, and fix those problems. I'd love to have a viable iTunes competitor.
EDIT: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/_feathers_ick, http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/controls_for_layo..., http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/work_better_with_..., http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/make_songbird_a_b...
Though I don't deny there is a market for alternative players (foobar2000, MusicIP Mixer), i've never understood what songbird was really offering that made them standout and get all the press they do.
What market are they after? Well, I might consider buying an iPod now that it isn't tethered to freakin iTunes.
Installed. Booted. Crashed to desktop. Reinstalled with no extensions. Wondered why I couldn't import any music. Noticed that the music was imported, it's just that no text was displaying in the library. Played a few songs and started paying attention to something else. Noticed that it suddenly crashed for no apparent reason.
Back to using foobar2000...
