Thread: Songbird, The Open-source

Media player has been generating lots of hype over the past two years even, when it was still being developed. With the release of its official 1.0 version, the developers are projecting it as a highly customizable music player with lots of innovative features thrown in. In the same breath they admit that there are still some 'grey' areas which need to be fine-tuned in the future.

Songbird is different in the sense that it really tries to utilize various Web services and is integrated seam lessly for a complete different experience not found in other players. It is built on Mozilla code used for building Firefox. The features which are identifiable with Firefox like tab browsing, add-on support, and bookmarking are integrated giving it a browser feel. On its. own, it is a basic player with the ability to utilize add-ons for upgrading it to a full-featured media player.

Installation was easy enough and the option for importing media from a local directory or iTunes library was a breeze - it took less than a minute to import a 6GB of media files. Also during the installation process, it also provides you with some default add-ons you can install to expand the player functionality.

There are some good things we found while testing it. For one, as a player for listening to music, Song-bird was competent with decent audio quality. For someone who loves to use the Net for searching and listening to music, Songbird comes as a boon. The fea¬ture that stands out are the mashTape service which provides you with info about the artist (biography, discography, Web links, and tags), news (aggregated from various sources like Google News, Hype machine, and Digg), Flickr photos, and YouTube videos. Last.fm integration is another good feature which lets you to 'scrobble', love, or bans any audio tracks.



It supports a large number of media formats including MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, WMA, AAC, Fairplay, etc. It can also play DRM protected WMAjiTunes audio files which is a good thing for someone who doesn't wants to get stuck to one player for playing DRM protected files. Another cool feature that we found was its ability to display any playable audio files as a playlist which is helpful for playing and downloading files from the Net and while at it, you can even subscribe to Music sites.

But all is not hunky-dory there are some areas where it lacks behind compared to the other media players. The most glaring defect is the omission for CD sup¬port (cannot play, rip, or burn CDs). The exclusion of an Equalizer also seems a bit odd for an audio player. It is also supposed to support iPod devices but newer devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Microsoft Zune are not supported. The option of watching folders for automatically importing media from defined folders is sadly missing too. Video support, which is not that essential for an audio player but nonetheless; good addition, is also currently not available.