So, I’ve decided to take Nightingale, the community fork of Songbird for a spin to see what it can do.

So far, I’m very impressed by it. The user interface is surprisingly mature, it performs smoothly and I’ve only spotted one issue so far: the play queue functionality is nonfunctional. The over all impression I get is of a superior product to all manner of open source music players and library managers. It still has a while to go before I decide to give up on iTunes entirely, and while it only has been running on elspeth for a few minutes, it looks like my search for a new music player has, for the first time in quite some time, acquired some serious competition.