Songbird vs Nightingale
I’ve been using Songbird ever since it was a promising, upcoming, cross-platform open source media player. Back then, I even had it running on a parallel installation of Windows and Fedora on (physically) the same library 🙂
Since then, it seems they cut the support for Linux 😦 and POTI Inc. (the company behind Songbird) seem to focus on mobile/web and losing more and more interest in the good old desktop version. At least, that’s what springs to mind when searching the songbird web page for the desktop version.
In addition, there’s this everlasting performance problem, which seems to be inevitable as soon as your library reaches the magic 10k song limit.
Still, I like Songbird’s functionality, it’s open source nature and the addon system. Therefore I never got comfortable with iTunes, Amarok or whatever.
Only just recently, I came across a Songbird fork that looks pretty promising: Nightingale. It supports Linux and there still seems to be some development going on.
Trying Nightingale with your existing Songbird Database or even migrating to Nightingale is fairly easy, as the database as well as addons seem to be compatible with Songbird.
That’s what worked for me (on Windows):
- Back up songbird folders (just in case):
- %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Songbird2 and
- %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Songbird2.
- Create symlinks from Songbird to Nightingale folders:
- mklink /D %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Nightingale %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Songbird2
- mklink /D %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Nightingale %HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Songbird2
This should make your Songbird database available on both Nightingale and Songbird. I’d recommend not to run them both in parallel.
IT affinity! 
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