One of the unfortunate things about moving to a MacBook for personal computing is the iTunes hegemony. I mainly listen to DJ mix CDs which makes me a very playlist oriented type of guy. iTunes is radically track oriented and over time I’ve found a number of “playlist hostile” warts. For example, I’ve never figured out a way to select multiple playlists and move them to my iPod.
But my biggest gripe is that iTunes doesn’t support streaming of music in Ogg Vorbis format. This is obviously a complete geek Rube Goldberg setup, but I have an icecast server setup on a UNIX machine, which I can drive from any remote shell with a combination of mpd and ncmpc. What can I say it works for me, and anywhere I can ssh from I can get to my music. Not to mention I can geek out and write scripts to control my jukebox.
Just for grins, I decided to download Songbird and give it a go. Dang if it didn’t do the right thing straight off of the disk image! It’s glitchy in a few places, for example there’s a noticeable lag when navigating playlists, and sometimes the streams skip. But Songbird’s got the right price and it fills an unfortunate hole in iTunes.