SongBird 1.2 won’t start on Ubuntu 9.04: Fix

Vivek — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:27:37 +0000

It was strange and I was struggling to get songbird 1.2.0 to start on Ubuntu 9.04. For some reason songbird 1.2.0 won’t start on Ubuntu 9.04. I did some reading on line and found the culprit which was causing it to not start. All you have to do is to remove the package named libvisual-0.4-plugins.

In order to remove and start enjoying SongBird on ubuntu 9.04 again follow the steps:

1. Bring up the terminal by hitting ALT+f2 and typing gnome-terminal.

2. Type the following to remove libvisual-0.4-plugins

sudo apt-get remove libvisual-0.4-plugins

3. That’s it. Now you can enjoy SongBird again.

Note: More information about the package libvisual-0.4-plugins can be found at http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper-backports/sound/libvisual-0.4-plugins

SongBird: A complete installation and configuration guide

Vivek — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:39:49 +0000

Songbird is a fantastic music player which is available for all the major OS platforms like Linux, Windows and OSX. The beauty of the player is it’s like the famous iTunes but takes configuration to a new level with extensions. You can pimp it up with themes and best of all it’s an open source software which means you get a huge community support. Let’s see how to install and configure songbird for a complete music experience.

Homepage

http://getsongbird.com/

Description

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player.

Users can add features and change functionality in Songbird by installing extensions. Community coded extensions are available on Songbird’s addons support page.

Skins are referred to as “feathers” in Songbird, and give users and artists the ability to change the look of Songbird via an extension which generates a default skin.

Download

Let us download the deb file of songbird from here.

Install and run songbird

Once you have downloaded the deb file, installation is pretty simple. Just double click the file to install songbird.
You can run songbird by going to Applications > Sound & Video > Songbird.

When you run it for the first time you’ll be greeted with various screens

Following is how the main window of songbird looks like:

In order to install a new theme for songbird, you can go to the following link and click install to install a new theme.

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons?category=appearance

To get new extensions in order to customise song bird go to the following link:

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/recommended