[digg=http://digg.com/software/Review_of_the_open_source_music_application_Songbird_0_4]
Songbird (wikipedia) is a cross platform music player. It’s based of the Firefox source code, which is kind of weird.. But it seems that creating a music application from an Internet browser wasn’t such a stupid idea after all.
I tried Songbird when the 0.1 release candidate or something was released. I really wanted to like it, but I couldn’t see what all the fuzz was about. “Hurray, it’s Firefox with a black skin which plays mp3s”. A friend of mine has now open my eyes though. The current Songbird version is “developers release 0.4″, but don’t let the name fool you. It’s fully operational, in the same as Gmail still is in beta.
Just like Firefox, Songbird is all about add-ons. The application itself is an iTunes-looking player that plays lots of different formats. It also has bookmarks to several music websites (which can be customized). One of these bookmarks is Skreemr which searches through blogs for the song title you enter. The results are great, meaning you can through out Limewire, DC++, KaZaA (if you still had any of those lying around) and have a great download client right in your default music player. And the great thing is that Songbird lets you stream or download directly into your music library.
But as I said, it’s the add-ons that turns Songbird into a premium music application. I’ve got these add-ons installed: Album Art Manager, Audioscrobbler, iBird, Now Playing List, Wikipedia and Norwegian translation. I would also like to install AlbumApplet when it supports the 0.4 release, as it gives you the nice CoverFlow function from iTunes.
Album Art Manager takes care of fetching album art, displaying them and showing a nice notification when the song changes- Audioscrobbler gives you basic last.fm support
- iBird is a feather (read skin) that makes it look like a native OS X application
- Now Playing List divides the music library into two parts, as in Amarok, so you’ve got a playlist-view and a library-view at the same time
- Wikipedia fetches and displays information about the artist
- And there’s a translation for pretty much any language imaginable
What I would like to see is:
- Better last.fm support. I would like to have pretty much have the same possibilities as in the last.fm application (which is open source, so it shouldn’t be a problem if someone just copy&pasted the code into Songbird)
- Nokia music transfer. Probably not going to happen though, as Nokia loves keeping things closed
- Replay gain which normalizes the sound of all the tracks in the library
- Lyrics fetcher and viewer
- Adblock which removes ads from the different bookmark (maybe it’s possible to just add the Adblock add-on for Firefox?)
- *UPDATE* When the last.fm support is in, I would like to send the song now playing straight to Skreemr, hey, and why not automatically download the first hit? So what I really want is a download button in the last.fm radio.
If you actually read all of this, why not take Songbird for a spin?
February 8th, 2008 | Other | Read comments (3) | Write comment
