If you have not heard of a program called Songbird, I would love to be the first to introduce it to you.
“Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and
skinsfeathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.” -songbirdnest.com
A friend at work showed me Songbird this week, and I was very impressed with the screencast. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not easily amused, so I highly suggest watching the screencast before before continuing.
According to the Songbird Owners Manual, Songbird has been called “the Firefox of media players” by Aaron Boodman of Greasemonkey and described as “like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet.” by the popular blog Ross Notes.First, I have got to mention that the artist who draws all of the mascot logos has some incredible talent – they all look terrific and fit well together. The graphics alone will really help to bring the program into the spotlight, and some of them are pretty hilarious, such as the one on the right. Lets see some screenshots of the installation and interface.Installation
Initial Screen
Shoutcast integration.
Dogpile Search with music files listed in the bottom pane. A simple select all and clicking download sends all of the files available on the page to your hard drive. Nice!
I am COMPLETELY enthralled by Songbird – this thing is really slick, especially for a 0.2 release!
It is smart in many ways that are similar to some things I have seen in Firefox Add-ons, such as the list view of all elements on the page. The developers went the correct route by building from the Mozilla XUL Runner platform and starting another program completely, instead of writing something kludgey on top of Firefox.
Songbird is incredibly easy to use, especially after watching the screencast. Case in point – A whopping 5 minutes after installing this program, I had downloaded nearly 200 MB of MP3 files from various sources.
It’s almost as good as having Napster before those whiny bastards in a band I used to like called Metallica threw a temper tantrum…
Songbird’s interface is far more intuitive and efficient than iTunes, which is no small feat. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using it, it’s become a staple of my music listening utilities since I installed it.
The developers are aiming for a 2008 release to the mainstream, and I can guarantee you this program is going to become very, very ubiquitous in everyday life. The VC backing Songbird is none other than Sequoia Capital – if you aren’t familiar, this is the same company that first invested in complete failures like Google, Paypal, YouTube, etc.
Songbird will be more popular than iTunes, it is a question of when, not if.
Now if they can just get it to sync with my iPhone…
6 replies on “Warning: Program Called “Songbird” May Rock Your Socks Off! Runs On Linux, Mac, and Windows!”
[…] Wendy Knits! wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf you have not heard of a program called Songbird, I would love to be the first to introduce it to you. “Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins … […]
At least FireFox is somewhat standards-compliant… I can has GTK/Qt support?
Here’s a link to a script to help download and install it on ubuntu.
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/songbird
Thanks, but I’ll stick with Amarok – this just looks like an iTunes knockoff.
Songbird is a freaking awesome music player. I swear by it for playing my music collection in Linux. There are a few problems with it… Bad podcast management, unresponsive playlists, and inability to sort smart playlists are a few. Other than that, it’s a great music player.
See my full review @ http://tinyurl.com/2xpexo
-A
chilimonkey thanks for the link.
I installed in Fedora so the yum package installed without a hitch, although I needed to install MP3 support before anything would play.
Nice review Adam.