Songbird-The Open Music Player

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player & web browser that’s under active development. It’s being developed as open source by a group known as Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine), with a stated mission “to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web.

Songbird employs Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, and is thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. Songbird utilizes the GStreamer media framework.

The stable edition available for download is 1.0 while v1.1 beta is available for testing.

Features

Integrated Services

• mashTape: Discover Flickr photos, YouTube videos, last.fm biographies, Google news (and more) for the currently playing artist
• last.fm: Integrated Last.fm support allows you to scrobble, love, and ban your tracks.
• ShoutcastRadio: Stream music using the integrated SHOUTcast Radio directory
• In Beta or Coming Soon: CD Rip, Album Artwork, Watch Folders, Video, Metadata Management etc

Player Features

• Cross-platform compatibility with XP, Vista, Mac OS X v10.5 (x86) and Linux (x86, x86_64). Mac OS X v10.4-10.5 PPC and Windows 2000 are unofficially supported by either 1.0 for PPC or using the official Win32 version to run on 2000.
• Ability to play multiple audio formats, such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Apple Lossless and WMA
• Ability to play Apple FairPlay-encoded audio on Windows and Mac platforms via hooks into QuickTime (authorization takes place in iTunes)
• Ability to play Windows Media DRM audio on Windows platforms
• A skinnable interface, via feathers
• Media files stored on pages viewed in the browser show up as playable files in Songbird
• MP3 file download
• Ability to subscribe to MP3 blogs as playlists
• User-created bookmarks
• Ability to build custom mixes
• Ability to scan the user’s computer for all audio files and add them to a local library
• A configurable and collapsible graphical user interface similar to iTunes, and mini-player mode
  Keyboard shortcuts and media keyboard support
• Automatic updates
• eMusic integration using the eMusic Integration plugin
• Last.fm integration via a plugin, complete with love/hate buttons
• Insound.com and HypeMachine integration
• Amie Street integration
• Microsoft MTP compatible device support
• Ability to edit metadata tags and save back to file

Extensions

Zune MTP support, Songbird 0.5Users can add features and change functionality in Songbird by installing extensions. Community coded extensions are available on Songbird’s addons support page. Known community designed extensions are: Qloud Tagging & Search, eMusic Integration, iTunes Importer, iPod Device, Artist Tracker, Library File Organizer, Audioscrobbler Notifier, Wikipedia Artist Display, SHOUTcast Radio Directory, UnPlug, Adblock Plus, Taglib metadata handler and Minimize-to-Systemtray, and ChatZilla.

Skins

Skins are referred to as “feathers” in Songbird, and give users and artists the ability to change the look of Songbird via an extension which generates a default skin. Using CSS (and optionally XUL), and an image manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP, users are then able to make Songbird look however they want.

You can change the Skins(Feathers) by going to View->Feathers->Skin

My Review
I have just started using Songbird and my experience so far has been good one. The player provides more than what is expected of it. The interface of the player looks similar to that of iTunes while the browser is very much similar to Firefox as it’s based on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform which also provides it cross-platform functionality. Skins available are also quite good, Sparkle being my favorite. The player also has inbuilt downloaded which can be used to download music. Being open source its development is going quick way & many features are getting added on daily basis. Although it takes a slightly more times to load & it’s installation also takes about 35Mb but looking at the functionality it gives and being Free it definitely deserves a  try.

My Rating: 4/5

Well here ends my post. I am new to blogging & learning to write better. Hope you liked my post, since Songbird is quite new therefore I gave detailed info. Plz let me know if you liked it or disliked it. Let me know via comment or you can mail me @ jatinsapra@in.com. Thnks for reading….[:)]

Links: Download Songbird