Songbird is shaping up to be an amazing media player. It’s not only got audio and video capability (with a HUGE range of media types) but it’s built on the Mozilla engine, meaning it’s also a web browser. Not only that, but for a preview release (0.2 people!) it’s looking slicker than a puddle of oil with George W. Bush floating in it.
Here’s how to set it up on your Ubuntu box, add it to your applications menu and generally enjoy the hell out of it.
First, we have to get it. For this release, go here. I’m going to assume that you download it to your Desktop.
That will give you the Songbird_0_2_RC2_linux-i686.tar.gz file. Let’s move it to your opt (as in optional) directory, and to do that we need to use sudo. So, let’d open up a terminal and do the following.
cd /opt
sudo cp ~/Desktop/Song* .
Now we have the tarball in our /opt directory. Let’s untar it and get to work.
tar zxvf Song*.tar.gz
Phew! Now we’re working up a sweat. Not to worry, once you get this thing going, you can throw on some Bill Haley and be sweatin’ to the oldies in no time.
So we’ve got a directory in opt now that looks something like this:
Songbird_20061003
Lets’ do a little ownership change on this bad boy so you can launch Songbird as yourself.
sudo chown -R username:username Songbird_20061003
You’re going to want to substitute your username in the above statement. Don’t know who you are? Simply type:
whoami
Anyway, moving right along, let’s make this directory a bit easier to work with.
mv Songbird_20061003 Songbird
There, now we’ll save on the typing. Or cutting and pasting, depending on how lazy you really are.
So now you want to test Songbird to see if it launches.
cd Songbird
Ready? Here’s the hard part, we’ve done all this work and now we have to get the thing to run.
./Songbird
Yup, that’s it. Now it should be launching. Wow! Look at that design, feel the smooth edges, hear the gasps from your geek friends as they peer over your shoulders! Is that dandruff?
So, we’ve got it installed and running, now let’s add it to our Applications menu.
First, we need an icon, so you don’t end up stealing an icon from etherape or something. Thankfully I’ve planned this thing out and I have an icon for you right below this line. Just right click on it and save it to your desktop.
Got it? Great! Now let’s put it in the right place. Back into your terminal session for this one:
cd /usr/share/pixmaps
sudo cp ~/Desktop/sb.png .
Whammo! You’re doing great! Enjoy this encouragement! You’re wonderful! Ahem. Anyway. . . .
Let’s get this thing into the Applications menu. Right click on Applications at the top of your desktop (or wherever you’ve moved it too you hacker you) and choose “Edit Menus“.
This will open up the Alacarte Menu Editor. On your left find “Sound & Video” Left click on this once to highlight it and then choose from the top menu File -> New Entry.
For the name, let’s put Songbird. Under the comment, and this is important, put Thanks You Hooty Developers. And for the command, let’s add this:
/opt/Songbird/Songbird
Now, click the button that says “No Icon” and browse down to sb.png. You should also recognize the pic, having just downloaded it. Choose this.
Finally, click OK. You’re ready to rock! You can now go to Applications -> Sound & Video -> Songbird and launch this fantastic new product.
If you want to check for new developements in the Songbird world, simply launch Songbird, go to the top Help menu, and choose “Search for Updates“. Look familiar?
Take some time to explore, it will be worth it, and enjoy your new media goodness!
geek out.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Let me just add, that after further exploration, this product is now my default media player in Ubuntu. It’s going to be a great product and distribution tool for any musician/indie house that doesn’t mind some free distribution.
That, and it looks GOOD!
October 8th, 2006 at 11:35 am
i cannot untar can you help
October 8th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
try tar -xzvf
g
October 9th, 2006 at 3:12 am
Could have done without the lame Bush comment .
October 9th, 2006 at 8:33 am
Yeah, I go for cheap laughs - it’s my Vaudeville past and having Groucho Marx for a great uncle.
You should see my mustache and glasses shtick.
October 9th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Excellent tutorial! Thanks!
October 9th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
I run ubuntu dapper drake and as far as I can tell new apt-able programs are installed in the /usr/lib dir. Is there a special reason you chose opt for songbird? I realize it boils down to preference, but what of understanding how the linux default file system came to be? There must be a reason to it’s laconic madness.
I see Bush happily floating in a yellow boat. “ahehehe”.
October 9th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Hey Danny,
I personally like to use opt because that’s what it’s for - optional stuff. Until a package comes out of beta and I’m installing it on my own, I usually just put it there.
But really, you could throw this or any other program into /etc/bing/super-duper/throw/me/mother and it would chug along.
Crazy, I know, but crazy like a fox.
October 10th, 2006 at 9:29 am
No offence intended, but why would I prefer to do things this way rather than the Windows “double-click install.exe”?
I really like Linux, but don’t have the time to learn all these commands just to install something.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:43 am
I like doing it that way Bob, because I don’t have to fork out $$$ for a Windows license, and because I don’t like to have my box call “home” occasionally just to check in with Ma and Pa Soft.
Basically, I’m a supporter of free and open software, not expensive and closed.
October 10th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
That worked very well! I’m going to do a portuguese version on my blog in the near future, if that’s okay with you.
October 10th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
Hi Lobo,
Sounds good to me, go ahead and put it on your blog. Please do link to ArsGeek though!
thanks!
October 11th, 2006 at 11:29 am
It would be helpful to mention the gstreamer plugins you have to install to get Songbird to work. Great work, very helpful
Ditto on the Bush comment. Please adhere to your own standards:
“Non-geek Stuff. What constitutes non-geek? Well, we get to decide but you can bet your sweet patooti that if you’re writing about your cat, barbies, what you did last night or the latest celebrity gossip, you probably won’t see it on ArsGeek” — ArsGeek No Nos
October 11th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Hey Steve,
Good point on the gstreamer plugins.
As for the Bush comment, I put in a lot of work to this site, so I reserve the right to add one horrible joke and/or bad pun per 5,000 words. It’s either that, or I may have to start up with the bad sea-monkey poetry again and I don’t think anyone wants to see that.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Actually I had downloaded it to my a directory within my home directory. Then used the GUI file archive tool to “explode it” Then from a terminal
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/songbird
sudo mv ~/data/Songbird_20061003/* /usr/lib/songbird
(since it was downloaded to one of my directories it assumed my ownership so I didn’t need the chown or chgrp cmds.)
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/songbird/Songbird /usr/bin/songbird (to create symbolic link from /usr/bin to /usr/lib)
The rest was the same as what you had done except the icon I used from /usr/lib/songbird/chrome/icons/default. which since I’ve saved yours, I’ll be changing.
This by the way is on Dapper Drake also.
October 13th, 2006 at 7:59 am
FYI - there was an update to songbird 0.2 released today. Also, if you’re up for removing your executable and reinstalling, there’s 4 new extensions available.
October 14th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Hi,
untar command would work a lot better if preceded by ’sudo’.
Player is cool though
October 17th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Gijs Said:
“untar command would work a lot better if preceded by ’sudo’”
Adding sudo to the tar command would make no difference presuming you have proper file permissions.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Hey Bob…
No problem about the prefers, but it’s very nice learn everything you can, don’t you?
If you don’t have much time, then choose Windows…
March 10th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
“…it’s looking slicker than a puddle of oil with George W. Bush floating in it.”
Now that’s slick!
July 6th, 2007 at 8:44 am
I came across this article, had no trouble installing s/b. But a missing GStreamer plugin caused problems. This article explains, why you need which Plugins:
http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/trac.cgi/wiki/SettingUpGStreamer
November 1st, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Now that 0.3 is out I followed your guide (replacing the file names and such) and it worked great. As a newbie I really appreciate you putting this together.
March 16th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Hey found your tutorial as only sensible one…. gotta ask, Now ive downloaded songbird 0.4 and followed your istructions with 0.4 filename instead.
Currently i moved the tar.gz to /opt but it wont untar. Its says - “error exit delayed from previous errors”.
What can i do? hope youre still around.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Hey Jola,
Two things could be going on there. First, are you using sudo when you execute the tar command?
i.e. sudo somecommand
Second, are you running out of space?
Let me know what happens.
Ben
March 17th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
sweet you answered….. no i have 1.5gb space left… i should be fine…. Hmmmm… no i didnt use sudo. So i should do : sudo tar zxvf Song*.tar.gz ? yes
March 17th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Jola,
That’s right - you need root permissions to modify stuff in the /opt directory. That’s probably why it isn’t working for you.
Good luck!
Ben
March 17th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
ok did it. made it so far. but songbird doesnt work for some reason. No sound, no nothing. I think im just gonna clean out the /opt folder. Do you know how to do that? thanks man.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:44 am
What is the diff between doing it this way and the very easy way of going to getdeb.net and downloading the .deb? easy… i think. But can anyone tell me why there is such a difference between the download on the songbird site, and the .deb? its 23MB to 12MB… anyone?
June 28th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Droz - the big difference is probably that I wrote this almost 2 years ago. Don’t know if getdeb was around then or not, or if Songbird was available through it.
Ben
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Bet all you bush supporting jackasses ain’t smiling now. it them again ArsGeek. I know this comment is way late, went from beta0.2 to release 1.0
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Bet all you bush supporting jackas*es ain’t smiling now. it them again ArsGeek. I know this comment is way late, went from beta0.2 to release 1.0
February 22nd, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Hey I have songbird installed on Debian Lennie. I chmodded the entire directory (Songbird) to allow all users access. I can run from the command line no problem but when I attempt to run from the menu (after creating a new menu item and pointing to the executable file) Nothing happens. No error messages, no disk access, nothing. The icon is there and when I push it the menu goes away as if it were loading but no songbird. I attempted telling the menu editor to run in terminal as well with no luck. Until I finish this I will continue running from the command line. Thanks.
Sb.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 am
thanks Pal,
this staff works up to now.
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:17 am
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July 12th, 2010 at 5:43 am
The blog is great. This tips can definitely help me how to install this media player
July 15th, 2010 at 3:38 am
Thank you for this tutorial I’ll try installing Songbird on my Ubuntu, hope it will work.