Songbird 11 February 2006

I’ve played with Songbird for a few days, and I thought I should tell you about it. This current release is a proof of concept, so it is pretty rough round the edges at the moment. Although the music player and manager has the same code base as Firefox, it looks like iTunes.

Songbird has got some rather neat features like scanning web pages for audio and video files, automatic subscribing for podcasts, and the mini player is rather swanky.

Now anything based on Firefox is OK by me! After having a play with Songbird, its clearly got more bugs then a Sellafield hooker but it looks like this could be a damn good player.

So why should you get all excited about it? Well you shouldn’t, it’s not good enough to be released yet, and like I said before it’s in its early stages, but it has promise. Supporting MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA, with more to come as well as video formats, I hope this turns out to be a solid alternative to Winamp or iTunes. Being based on the Firefox code, it is free and open source- so it already scores points with me. As yet there is only a Windows release, but they are working on a Mac version. Also, because the base code is Firefox- integration between Songbird, Firefox, and Thunderbird should be easier than Paris Hilton at a vicars and tarts party.

Anyway, by no means could it replace your player of choice at the moment, that’s not to say that it never will.