Streamlined iTunes alternative?

Nightingale is a free music management program that aims to be an open source alternative to iTunes.

In terms of appearance, Nightingale is attractive, but not very innovative. It’s got a nice slick and easy-to-use interface, and can be customized with feathers – Nightingale’s equivalent of skins. These must be downloaded separately,and there aren’t very many of them, but the job is made easy thanks to the app’s built-in browser.

Unfortunately, Nightingale doesn’t seem to get very far in the options race. Although it supports music and video, it has a hard time with anything else. It can’t handle podcasts or streaming media natively, for example, and has a limited selection of tools for customizing or modifying your music. When you compare it to an app like VLC, for example, Nightingale looks really bare.

One area where Nightingale does stand out, however, is extras. Given the built-in browser, it’s really easy to get extra content for the app, from album artwork to skins and add-ons. There’s not a huge number of any of these (3 skins, about 26 add-ons), but they add some nice functionality, like Icecast and Last.fm support.

Nightingale looks good, but relies on add-ons for almost all functionality beyond basic music and video playback. If it’s your first dealing with a media player, you might well be impressed with its slick looks and ease of use, but for the rest of us – and we’re the majority – it just feels like Nightingale is all style and no substance.

Nightingale is a good-looking player, but in terms of functionality, falls well short of the mark.

Based off of the latest Songbird changes, providing better performanceUses the more recent Gecko 1.9.2Play Queue functionality is now implementedThe feather has been refreshed by GeekShadow, as designed by Manko10Update functionality – get future releases automaticallyBuild system improvementsVarious other bugfixes – see the git logs for a complete list

Changes

• Based off of the latest Songbird changes, providing better performanceUses the more recent Gecko 1.9.2Play Queue functionality is now implementedThe feather has been refreshed by GeekShadow, as designed by Manko10Update functionality – get future releases automaticallyBuild system improvementsVarious other bugfixes – see the git logs for a complete list