Songbird 0.7 RC1
Songbird is a media browser and Web player built from Firefox, VLC Player, and SQLite. Songbird is open source and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Version 0.6 adds better support for large libraries, smoothing scrolling through libraries, faster filtering, speedier search, improvement memory managment, and new features like metadata writing, better MTPSync support, and the ability to find text on Web pages.
Download.com editor's review of Songbird
If Firefox and iTunes hooked up, their hatchling could very well be Songbird. Although it's in beta and plenty buggy, it's also a very fun app that's part music player, part Web browser, and all about music discovery, management, and playback.
During installation, it'll ask if you want to load your iTunes music directory or another media directory, or perform the task later. Processing 5,000 songs took about 3 minutes, not a bad pace. It then asks you which of the pre-installed Songbird extensions you want to load. Most of these, like the iPod and USB device manager, only make the app stronger.
The left sidebar provides quick links to bookmarks, downloads, your music library in an iTunes-style interface, and several music discovery Web sites to get your started. When you're looking at any Web site with MP3s available for download, Songbird will open a new window at the bottom main browsing pane. Double-click on a song to play it, while links on the right let you purchase the track from Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, and Amie St. They also tell you the format of the track--MP3 or AAC, for example, and provide a blog link for more info.
Songbird has a growing library of extensions, and support is slowly growing for those written originally for Firefox. Many of the improvements from the last version make for a dramatic change, but Songbird is definitely a beta: caveat emptor. Still, it could really take flight for the music-loving, Web-surfing fanatic in all of us.
Songbird Main Feature:
- Personalize Your Player
Choose from hundreds of useful add-ons that enhance Songbird. For example, MediaFlow is a community contributed add-on that allows you to visually take a spin through your music collection. Try it out, or build one of your own, and make Songbird your media player! - Discover Music
Subscribe to music blogs, get notified of new tracks, and experience rich integration with sites like The Hype Machine. Stream or download directly to your library. Never miss a beat, start playing the web. - Sync Your Device
Manually transfer or sync media to your device. We support a variety of iPods and MTP Devices. - Community Powered
Just like Firefox, Songbird is community powered, open source, cross platform, and built on the Mozilla stack. There are several ways to help make Songbird better. Check out the Songbird Developer Center where you can find information about the project—how to hack on it, connect with the team, submit code, and create your own add-ons.
Songbird Version:
Songbird 0.7 RC1
Songbird New Version Change Log:
- * Refreshed UI: refined look and feel
- * New setup assistant: get up and running in Songbird with ease (requires a fresh profile)
- * Smart playlists: create dynamic playlists based on criteria you set
- * Concert calendar: find upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your library
- * Last.fm support: scrobble the tracks you play and love or ban them
- * GStreamer on all platforms: this is our first cross platform release using GStreamer as our new media core, by default it handles all FLAC playback on Windows/Mac (or you can enable GStreamer to handle more codecs)
- * Zippier metadata reading: much faster media scanning
- * Reduced memory useage on Windows/Linux: we landed jemalloc as the applications memory allocator
