This keeps getting better. The design is great and the concept is great. I love Apple, but their whole approach to DRM and iTunes' walled garden approach is a turn off at times. Waiting for the library of plug-ins to grow and attain firefox-like status in the media player space.

I agree that there are some similarities with iTunes - you can import your music, subscribe to podcasts, create playlists, rate each song, synchronize your playlists, etc. etc.

BUT This is OPEN SOURCE!

1. You can download extensions to change the look, feel & functionality as you please (e.g. You can download an add-on that displays the wikipedia page for the artist currently playing). Check out the entire list of add-ons at http://addons.songbirdnest.com/

2. You're not limited to a single file format and can download music from multiple stores - itunes, amazon, emusic

3. There is a whole lot of stuff being developed - tools and even the main offering is being enhanced very quickly.

So, its only a matter of time before Songbird surpasses iTunes as the best (Free) digital audio platform in the market

Works well for small libraries but the moment I added my entire collection (about 15,000 tracks) it started crawling. Its opensource, its young, and it will improve tremendously but you've got to give it some time...

Crappy basic functionality making it hard to queue songs.

User must select songs one by one and click a menu to add them to the play list that you must create first. Double clicking a song starts playing it in some "invisible playlist" and overall usability is very confusing.

Windows media player works better than this...