Over the past few months I’ve slowly gotten more and more annoyed by iTunes. The interface is so slow it makes me want to buy a Mac and all the latest iTunes updates have been met with some mixed responses.

Enter Songbird. Songbird is an open source music player that is labeled the Firefox for music players. Why? Because It’s doing a good job of giving me what I want and oh it has those precious addons we Firefox users love so much.

Songbird makes me feel quite at home because it looks like iTunes, almost. It has the same structure and nearly the same style making the switch pretty easy on the UI-centered part of my brain.

Out of the box, it invites you to try out some of the features like its built-in concert finder which is simply powered by Songkick (Unfortunately, not available in Canada!) as well as Last.fm support, which as an avid user I am a huge fan of. You can extend the power of Songbird quite easily with addons like mashTape which not only function great, but are super easy to install!

The real reason I decided to try it out was beause iTunes was slow slow slow. Songbird is actually pretty fast. Importing my entire library of 5,000+ songs took only about 5 minutes and moving around in the player itself is pretty quick. No random lag and weird UI glitches like iTunes for Windows. Oh, did I mention Songbird is available for Windows, Mac, AND Linux? Hell yeah, you guys rock.

Of course, Songbird is still in development and not even in 1.0 status yet. Adding Podcasts (Subscriptions) was a bit wonky and I’m still having some trouble with a few that I want to subscribe to and video isn’t quite there yet. These guys are working hard however to get new updates out make a name for themselves in the music player community. You can follow them on Twitter to get a bit more insight into their day-to-day workings

Overall, I am so far very happy with Songbird. It does what I need it to do with minimal hassle and the importing of my iTunes library made it quick and easy to switch. Once a few more bugs are squashed and a few features are tightened up it should be one hell of a killer music player.

P.S – Songkick, please get some Canadian support for your listings!