At last a true replacement for iTunes! I know I touted the virtues of iTunes, but just recently I’ve become frustrated with my iPod and iTunes. It always seems that at that critical moment (when you’re about to leave for work) your iPod decides to kill itself, where only a factory reset will do to get things working again!! Damn, that’s annoying..

So here is the true replacement for iTunes.. It’s called Songbird. It’s current incarnation is 0.2.5 but supports iPods, other mp3 players and playlists too, which you can synchronise at will. The podcast section still needs a bit of major tweaking, but if you’re prepared to do that manually it’s not too much of a hardship.

Apparently the program takes up a quarter of the footprint as iTunes (which is definitely a good thing) whilst retaining all the functionality. Of course, there’s no iTunes store, and the radio stations are different. And unfortunately, being Shoutcast, they tend to stall quite a bit during streaming - which I’ve noticed with Winamp also.

Also, did I mention that the code is Mozilla code? More importantly that makes it GPL, but also it makes the look and feel very familiar. You’ll notice also that when you go to the options section within the program it looks very much like Firefox. Then there’s that nice black skin.. Very Vista and very anti iTunes! [SHOW ME]