Songbird is the best thing to happen to Mac OS X, that's what it is. Any Mac user who ever used to use Windows knows that there are much better alternatives to iTunes, and for good reason. iTunes lacks a temporary playlist. You can't skin it in Mac OS X, although I hear you can in Windows. You can't really change the interface any. Sure, there are lots of great plug-ins, but it still doesn't change the fact that if you compare the features in iTunes to those of Windows Media Player, it's a downright disgrace. Enter... Songbird.
Songbird is built on Mozilla, it incorporates a browser, a media library, and a smorgasbord of plug-ins, many of them ported directly from Firefox and Thunderbird. But, my favorite part is how Songbird can find all the mp3s in a blog or webpage. This saves me the time of looking for each one, downloading them and playing them. I can play them without permanently downloading, and I can download them if I wish. If you don't think this is a big deal, just pay attention to the direction the innanet is going these days. Social networking is the biggest craze with new sites coming out all the time. I recently found one where you can upload anything to a virtual desktop. Your friends can play any file you put up, video, music, whatever. It's sure to be the next big hit because this is the best way to get your unique videos or music out to your distant friends, all from one location. Anyway, the ability to view these and any other site in Songbird and listen to the songs as if there were on your computer makes Songbird a must have. Not to mention, it's on every major platform, and as we've seen from Mozilla, that usually means it has to succeed. I should do more than just talk about it, here is Songbird on my system playing mp3s from Hear ya, the indie music blog.
I'm not showing all the plug-ins, some do have some bugs that cause excessive RAM usage. It supports tabs like Firefox, it supports my iTunes Library which is awesome. There are plug-ins to sync with your iPod or other devices. By version 0.6 they're expecting to have GStreamer support, which I believe will allow you to share your Songbird Library over a network. Since it's cross platform, that will be good for me. My wife is a big music fan, knows the song/album/artist names of just about anything she hears, and I know that once I tell her of the ability to find new music using the built-in Skreemer search engine or the ability to play a music blog, she'll never use iTunes or Yahoo Music again.
I stress that the developers still claim that their stable releases are for beta testers. I'm sure they won't change their minds on that until release 1.0. As good as it is now, I can only imagine how wonderful their first truly public release will be. Best of all, it's all open source and free. There is no doubt that as long we all all provide them our support, they will create the best music manager ever. Go to birdhouse.songbirdnest.com now and get your copy, you won't regret it!
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