I am guessing that the majority of us use iTunes to manage our digital music. The problem is, it’s not very good.

The ubiquitous iPod has pushed iTunes into the hands of millions, after all if you want to sync media with the iPod or iPhone you don’t have a great deal of choice. My main gripe with iTunes is the fact it tries to control everything. By default it will duplicate every music file you own and attempt to sort them in a way it feels appropriate. Being a designer the neatness of my files matters to me. A lot.

It’s not just that though, iTunes wants to rip my CDs as M4A files – not ideal when all my other tracks are in MP3. I like MP3 files as they play on anything. I feel like every time I use iTunes I have to play with the settings to get it to behave how I expect it to. Finally, what’s with all those arrows and trays that try to sell me tracks I already own?

To be honest I miss Winamp. Back when I was a PC, Winamp was my player of choice. It let me manage my files and watched my perfectly sorted music folders for when I changed or added music. It played every file I threw at it and collapsed into a tiny little music bar that stayed out the way. The skins and the plugins rocked too.

But today I want to talk about Songbird, a player that’s been around for some time but recently caught my attention again. Songbird describes itself as “The Open Music Player” and looks like this:

The unique feature of Songbird is that it’s built around Mozilla technology, essentially it’s Firefox customised for music. That means lots of plugins and themes, but most importantly it can be used as a browser too. One of my favourite music sites is Grooveshark. Grooveshark allows you to play virtually any track instantly, for free via your browser. But what about Spotify? (I hear you cry). Well Spotify is OK, but I don’t like audio adverts and I don’t like having yet another piece of software to listen to music. Spotify is also partly owned by the companies that got it wrong the first time round.

With Songbird I can manage all my local MP3 files and enjoy all those tracks I find online too. I have also installed some great plugins that allow you to manage the songs on your iPod, broadcast messages to Twitter and display lyrics for the current song. The one plugin that would make this setup even better would be integration with Amazon’s MP3 store. As a substitute it does integrate with the 7digital Music Store, however I have yet to try it. I would be interested to hear any feedback on the service.

With Sondbird, Grooveshark and the Amazon MP3 store I feel like the issues facing the music industry have become a problem of the past. Rock on.