Spoilers: It hadn't.
As I watched him use it, it seemed sluggish on his MacBook Pro, and he reported that it was using a third of one of his cores just to play music. Because I wanted to share in the fun, I loaded it up on my laptop to see just how bad it was.
Starting it up, it immediately claimed 30 or so megs. That's not unusual, it is based on the heaviest lightweight browser out there. (Aside: Does anyone still remember when Firefox actually was lightweight?) Walking through the initial wizard, it was using a cool 70MB, but once I let it loose on my collection, the memory usage began to climb. 90MB... 100MB... 110MB... it passed up Firefox at 110, and continues onward to 120 as I write this. I think they might still have some leaks to plug. Aaaaaand... it has stopped at a whopping 132MB of ram. For those at home without calculators, that's 34% of the physical memory in that machine.
Curiously, the memory usage drops when I begin playing around with Songbird. Playing a bog-standard MP3 from my collection ticks over the CPU at 20%, though. For pure computrons, that's much better than Erickson was seeing, but it's still disturbingly excessive. On the plus side, the slow, clunky interface does look nice. :/
By comparison, my music organization and playing solution, which is comprised of mplayer and the computer equivalent of bubble gum and baling wire, uses about 11MB of memory and ~2.5% CPU including an xterm. Granted, my system doesn't have a GUI, but I consider that to be a feature. Hell, foobar2000 running under wine is faster, uses less memory, has more features, and may well be more stable than Songbird.
If Apple users are excited about Songbird, I can only conclude that iTunes fucking blows. Oh, well. I guess you get what you pay for.
Oh, wait...
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