Songbird is a relatively new open source media player that is build from Mozilla and aims to revolutionize the media player market the same way firefox did to the browser market. Songbird is currently available in revision 0.2 “test flight” and runs on Windows 2000+, Linux and Mac just like firefox. Songbird comes with pretty much the same functionality as iTunes and more, due to the fact that it is based on the same core as firefox you can easily use songbird to browse between websites of radio stations, podcasts and blogs. Which means you play the songs and at the same time read what they have written in the same program.
The first start will give you the impression that songbird is big, really big and loaded with features. You see a list of menu items on the left side which consist of your song library, podcasts, radio stations and the like. Clicking on a link loads the website of that service and the available songs in the same window. You have the options to play and download the songs, subscribe to the website, add the song to the playlist or the library while at the same time surfing the website that offers those songs.
A great feature is that you use songbird to play the song which means you can use the controls like pause, play, forward in songbird and don’t rely on plugins in your browser anymore.
Songbird makes it really easy to find new music or more music from artists that you know about. You can search various services for new files, for example singinfish, google, yahoo and emusic. What you do is enter a search term, hit enter and the website of that service loads the search results. Once loaded songbird again displays two content areas, first the website with the content and at the bottom all the mp3 files that are currently available on that page.
You can drag and drop files to your library, playlist, download them and play them in songbird. All working flawlessly.
There is no iPod interaction as of now, at least none that I was able to detect in the short time that I’ve been using songbird.
The developers plan to build in some additional features like extensions which work the same way as they are in firefox and thunderbird and the ability to import and burn songs from CD.
Songbird is probably not the best media player when it comes to playing songs, it feels a little bit clumsly and loaded with features but it defiantly is the best when it comes to interaction between web and player. If you are using lots of podcasts, radio stations and the like songbird should be your number one choice.
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better than Amarok ?
(yeah I know amarok is linux-only but still…)
Sorry guys for this O.T., few weeks ago visiting this site i’ve found post a link for a site that “paint” the structure of the sites, if i remember fine in the post was posted a picture of the painted structure of ghacks.
Can someone remember the link?
Sorry to ask but i’ve read all the 130 pages and i don’t remember which was the post :((.
Thnaks for any help.
i remember hearing about this back when it was 0.1, finally a great alternative to itunes