I’ve been hunting around for a good music playing application for Ubuntu (8.04.1 - Hardy), and after some initial searching and testing I ended up on Amarok because I was impressed it used a proper database back end. Although, I’m not too impressed with the player itself, beyond 10,000 tracks and it starts to feel like your computer has turned into a jar of treacle.

Anyway, since that I decided to try Songbird again. I had initially dismissed this after it wouldn’t read files from Samba shares, and at that time my external with my music was on another PC. Now that external is plugged into the Ubuntu machine, so off I went to download and try it again.

The first hurdle, its not in the package system, and the official site doesn’t provide a .deb file, and I’m lazy. A quick google later and I have songbird_0.7.0-0~getdeb1_i386.deb!

I get it installed, I go to run it and it’s pre-run wizard loads up asking me if I want to search for media and what plug-ins I want. Unfortunately at the end of this it goes off to download the files, then disappears, then starts again. Very frustrating. I try it again just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of cosmic ray interference or some such, unfortunately it repeats itself again.

After about 30minutes of google abuse, installing older versions, uninstalling those older versions and installing the latest again, the solution is quite simple. Simply delete the “.songbird” directory from your own home directory. Now you would have thought that the package manager would have done that for me when I told it to “Completely remove this application including configuration files” obviously not…