Netbook itunes alternative - Mediamonkey or Songbird?

I've had one too many bad experiences with itunes and I think it's time I had a look at the competition when it comes to setting up my netbook (Acer One A150. 1.5gb RAM, 500gb HDD).

I'd like to find something that can stick the music on my ipod and that I can use to organise my music. I'm not the most clued-up when it comes to the more in depth stuff, but I'm a willing learner. Mediamonkey and Songbird seem to come highly recommended,but there are plenty of others and I'm willing to consider paying for something if it's worthwhile. I read about the add-ons/plugins for Songbird and there are a few that caught my eye.

One of the clinchers will be how resource-hungry the program is. If there are a couple of comparable programs, I'd go for the lightest as I'd like to be able to have it run in the background while I sort out other things.

I'm going to be travelling for a while, so I don't want to end up stuck with a program I hate, so it's quite a big decision.

 

I've tried both and preferred the layout of Songbird and loved the amount of customisation, but it was seriously slow and pretty much unusable. It seems that this isn't just an issue for me and is it's achilles heel. I've got a decent sized library (24000 songs) and every now and again it would run fine, but then it'd freeze and I'd be left twiddling my thumbs till it sorted itself out. It completely locked up my One 3 times in the space of 30mins. I tried running it in safe mode so I could rule out the plug ins causing the problems. Oh, and it was really resource hungry. Such a shame.

Mediamonkey seems lightening quick in comparison, with no lag or freeze ups (touch wood). It's not the prettiest but I'll have a look at the plug ins and add ons and see what there is to play around with - the ability to view the songs lyrics was great in songbird so I'll have a crack at installing one of those add ons. It runs a lot smoother and is lighter on resources so I guess at the mo, it's a no-brainaer.

 

I don't subscribe to iTunes store, but use the radio and podcast subscriptions regularly. Because it's the last version that didn't require a credit card I've been using iTunes version 6.05 - it's small and only uses about 50MB of memory. The store is accessible but I don't think it handles the new video stuff. Older versions available at FileHippo. Depending how much you do, it might do all you want with virtually no performance impact.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_itunes_32/1249/

 

Sorry Forone, I'm actually looking for an alternative to itunes, as I've had enough and want rid of it. I haven't downloaded it onto my netbook, nor will I unless all else fails. hence why I'm trying out MM. But I'm open to suggestions for other set-ups to try.

 

When I was looking for an alternative to iTunes, I came across Songbird. I thought it was pretty good, not sure how fast it will run on a netbook because installed it on a very high spec laptop.

 

Compared to itunes and MM it was ridiculously slow, unusably so with a decent sized library (as I mentioned earlier). Slow and buggy, and memory hungry meant it wasn't up to the task.