I’ve been playing around with the 1.0 release candidate of Songbird for a few days. For the ill-informed, Songbird is an open source, extension-based media player which is being developed as the “Firefox of media players”. I used an early build of the program a few months ago back when I was having a media player identity crisis. Eventually I settled with MediaMonkey, which is what I currently use for most of my music listening, but after seeing this new version I decided I’d give Songbird another try. And so far, I’m liking what I’m seeing (and hearing too).

I’ll withhold any critical judgment until the official release of Songbird 1.0, but I thought I’d point out a few things I like about it:

• iTunes-esque Interface - Okay, so this may also be considered a bad thing, but the new interface looks eerily similar to iTunes. I mean that in the best way humanly possible, of course; iTunes has always been notable for having a simple and intuitive interface. The songbird team clearly took the idea of simplicity to heart and made something even better.
• Extension-based Design - Like Mozilla Firefox, Songbird was built with extendability in mind. Also like Firefox, there’s a convenient database of extensions for users to download and install. As if that wasn’t enough, downloading and installing new extensions is so easy that I’m pretty sure it’s illegal in at least three countries. If it’s not, it should be.
• Last.fm Scrobbling Support - Last.fm, in case you don’t know, is just about the most awesome social networking site ever. It’s a convenient place for music junkies such as myself to congregate and share our musical tastes, while also simultaneously helping to discover new music. I’ve been hooked on Last.fm for the last couple months, and I’m a mad scrobbling machine. Now, I’m not entirely sure where the word “scrobbling” came from, and I probably don’t want to know, but it’s basically a way to track what songs/artists/albums you listen to and upload it on the internet. “That’s a violation of privacy!”, you’re probably saying to yourself. Well, the same can be said about every other social networking site out there. Anyway, before I get into a heated debate over privacy issues, Songbird is being shipped with native Last.fm scrobbling support, which I’m absolutely crazy about.

There’s some things I think Songbird could still use in order to fully convert me over from my beloved MediaMonkey (like an equalizer for example), but it’s certainly shaping up to be one hell of a media player. I’m definitely going to be keeping up with its development from here on out.

Well, it seems I’ve let comment spam get the best of me. The amount of comment spam I’ve gotten in the last few months was in the thousands. I’ve currently got Akismet running to help combat any future spam attacks. However, in an attempt to wipe out all of the thousands of existing spam comments, I seem to have accidentally deleted all of the non-spam comments as well. Oopsie.

EDIT: Strangely, posts still display the number of comments that there used to be, even though they’re gone. Pretty strange! Oh well.

I recently picked up a copy of Guitar Hero World Tour for the 360. I didn’t have very high expectations when I purchased it, so I wasn’t all that disappointed when the game turned out to be what is essentially a poor man’s Rock Band. As a matter of fact, the thing I was looking forward to most was the new guitar peripheral.

Red Octane typically makes better fake plastic instruments than Harmonix does. I strongly dislike the guitar that comes with the Rock Band bundle, so I’ve been using the guitar that came bundled with Guitar Hero III with that for some time. However, I did want another decent guitar controller for when friends come over, so we don’t have to fight over who gets to use the good controller. It just so happens that for a small extra fee, I could get a game along with a shiny new guitar controller, so I just had to get it.

At first, the new guitar controller proved to be even better than the one bundled with Guitar Hero III; the strum bar is quieter and easier to flick up and down at fast speeds, the buttons seem more responsive and have a better feel to them, and there’s a conveniently placed button for easier star power activation. However, and this is why I said “at first”, the joy did not last long. After a few hours of playing, the strum bar on my shiny new guitar controller would randomly stop recognizing strums periodically, essentially making the game unplayable. Needless to say, I was just a tad bit miffed. I looked online to see if there were any other reported instances of this happening. Lo and behold, there were. However, unlike Harmonix’s policy on replacing individual instruments, it seems like Red Octane/Activision is currently requesting that people go to the retailer they bought it at in order to get a replacement, which means packing up the entire box again and taking it back to the store. Luckily for me, I had only bought the guitar bundle, though I imagine it’d be quite a large inconvenience for people who had bought the full band bundle.

The next day I took it back to the store and got a replacement. Surely I couldn’t get two copies of the game in a row with faulty hardware, right? Sure as shit, the second one screwed up on me too, albeit a completely different problem this time around. This particular guitar had a strange problem where it wouldn’t recognize button presses if you held down more than one fret button at a time, rendering the game nearly impossible to play at all. So I packed that shit right back up and got a third replacement the day after. So far I haven’t had any problems with it, but I’m not going to hold my breath. If this one screws up on me, I’m just going to say “fuck it” and get my money back.

Update — Okay, so I’ve decided to go with the “fuck it” path and get my money back. The game is shitty and the quality of the hardware comes pretty damn close to rivaling the quality of the game. If you were thinking about buying any of the Guitar Hero bundles, I would highly advise against doing so. :D