Songbird is Harder Better Faster Stronger
Published by elliott bledsoe on Saturday, 14 June 2008 at 7:26 AMIt is hard being the little brother. With the imminent release of Firefox 3 looming on the horizon it is surprising the launch the Songbird 0.6 even made a blip on the Google News feed despite its pretty impressive expansion.
I would like to introduce you all to Songbird.
Imagine this:
It's a warm night out in the internets and a certain popular open-source software platform (Firefox) sits at an internet bar sipping cocktails with a certain popular but problematic proprietary music player software (iTunes). One thing leads to another and pretty soon they are both struggling to keep up the RAM as they duck off to "spend some more time together to view each others source code."
Ok, this isn't me just having some strange fantasy about a hot love affair between open source and proprietary software, just bear with me.
So what would happen 9 months later? Songbird, that's what!
Songbird is a music player-web browser hybrid, all wrapped up in a sleek black-tone skin (but if you don't like the look, don't worry, there's a number of 'feathers' or skins you can choose from). Along the top you have the music player with the standard directional buttons and play/pause (if you're more old school and like your play, pause and stop buttons separate there is an add-on for that). Along the left is your music playlists and bookmark navigation in an iTunes-style interface.
Whenever you view a page with playable tracks the browser lets you know with a pop up bubble. Convenient. Plus it's got all your standard features: simple bookmarking, tabbed browsing, in page text search. Other useful features: there are a number of integrated services to help you discover new music, there's a built in metadata editor,
You don't need to rebuild your iTunes playlists, Songbird can import them exactly as they are. I imported about 8000 tracks and it took just under 5 minutes. It even has support for portable media devices. And best of all, a number of useful add-ons like (or indeed from) Firefox are also available on Songbird. My add-on picks:
- Well MozCC of course, the add-on which scans each page you look at's metadata and informs you if it is under a Creative Commons licence;
- Of course also the add-ons to allow you to explore Magnatune and Jamendo;
- Shareacholic, for all your web 2.0 bookmark/tag/share goodness;
- Audioscrobbler to keep updating your Last.fm account;
- Mash Tape, which pulls in a wealth of useful info from around the web about the artist currently playing; and
- Tab Effect, for a bit of OS X-style pretties.
Note: some of them aren't available on 0.6 yet, but they should be soon (I hope).
The honesty: it is still buggy. The 0.6 release is the public alpha so there are still some complications. But it is by no means unusable. This little software package is destined for big things, but you wouldn't think it given the comparative fanfare between it and Firefox! Come on net users, fair go hey?!
You'll pass this on, won't you:
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