Last week I gave Songbird a chance and used it for a few days. What I don't like about it is the mediathek. I'm more the directory guy who organizes everything in folders. But the mediathek in Songbird can only be used for filtering your music by criterias and can't display the file system. Even the directory addon could not display the files correctly.
Don't get me wrong, the mediathek is perfect as it is. But I prefer the directory view which is not possible in Songbird.
But what made me really angry is the bad support for podcasts. I could not use Songbird for my favorite podcasts because it wouldn't recognize them. No episodes are displayed. It's a bug because some feeds store the url for the download in an enclosure-tag which is not recognized correctly by Songbird.
I was just about to deinstall the program when I found a link to the Songbird Podcatcher hack. It's a script (using the very cool pipe technology by Yahoo) which rewrites the feed so Songbird can understand it.
It works fine but now Songbird received only the latest episode of the podcast. So I played a little with the Yahoo pipes and created my own copy of the Podcatcher hack pipe.
It works really fine but Songbird always downloads all episodes. Even the episodes I deleted because I don't want them anymore. This behavior is really annoying and normally every podcatching client has a funtion to download only the files you want and to remember the files you don't want.
So I deinstalled and searched for a different podcatching client. After a while I found Ziepod and gave it a try. It has limited functionality of course but it really meets my requirements and I think I will stay with it for the next months (or years?).
It was quite a way to find Ziepod but this way I found a the cool Yahoo pipes along the road.
