Songbird keyboard tweaks

If you’re using Ubuntu, you’ll know that the default music player of Ubuntu is Rhythmbox. Now thats quite a good media player, but I like the good looks and ‘do more’ things of Songbird, so I use it.

Now you might have noticed, when you press the Media key on your keyboard (I’m talking about a multimedia keyboard here of course), Rhythmbox opens up. If you’re a Songbird fan (like me), you can change that setting, so that everytime you press the media key on your keyboard its Songbird which starts.

The solution is pretty simple really.

Go to GNOME Menu > System > Preference > Preferred Applications

Then select the Multimedia tab. The preferred media player would obviously be selected as Rhythmbox, you’ll probably see something like this:

So what you should do right now, is select ‘Custom’ from the dropdown menu and then type ‘songbird‘ as the command. It should look this:

You need not check the ‘Run in terminal’ option.

Now close the window and press the Media key on your keyboard. Voila! Its Songbird in front of you.

However I couldnt get the Play, Pause, Next, Forward keys to work though. So thats a bit of a let down.

Finally, if you would like to revert back to Rhythmbox, you can do that by selecting your preferred Multimedia application as Rhythmbox. Easy peasy.

Songbird – multiple album entries

Image via Wikipedia

This is something which I noticed the other day. When Songbird detects a new album which has songs from various different artists, it adds a new album entry for each and every song. This can be very annoying because you might end with hundreds of apparent albums when you have only a few.

The solution is very simple. Any album metadata (or ID3 tags) has an ‘Artist’ entry as well as an ‘Album Artist’ entry. Mediaflow characterises new entries on the basis of ‘Album Artist’, so if you have an album which has songs from various artists, i.e. has different ‘Artist’ entries, edit the metadata and make sure you have the same ‘Album Artist’ entry for the entire album. That way each album will have 1 entry regardless of the number of singers/artists for that album. I generally use ‘Various artists’ as my preferred entry. You can of course use your own.

This is a very minor issue but it can bother users. Hope this helped.

Songbird

Image via Wikipedia

I guess most of you must have heard of it, if not then this is for you.

Songbird is to Ubuntu what iTunes is to Mac or Windows. This music player uses the Mozilla build with loads of features. The best part is, it supports ‘add-ons’, yea much like the ones for Firefox, and believe me the add ons are brilliant! There are loads of customisation options available and the interface is unlike any other media player you have seen. And its syncing features are really awesome. So give it a try.

Songbird can be downloaded from the website here. (Although the Synaptic should already have Songbird)