Songbird – Firefox for Media Players
If you have not checked out Songbird – you should. Especially for anynone that like Firefox. It is built on the Mozilla platform…but for media playing. It supports extensions and themes (which are called feathers).
I have a 60GB iPod and use it for all my podcast subscriptions, etc. I have recently ripped all of my physcial CDs to MP3 to import into iTunes to be uploaded to my iPod. So I pretty much have all my audio stuff in iTunes. Upon installing Songbird, the intial installation had the option of installing several extensions (Itunes Library Import and Shoutcast Directory. After installation and the initial start of the application it found my iTunes library xml and asked it would like to import it. …and like magic, my iTunes library is available in Songbird. Cool. The other part I like is the .pls support, which iTunes does not provide – as I love Shoutcast. Songbird supports .pls and with the Shoutcast Directory extension, it will broswe the Shoutcast channels for me. I looked at some of the other extensions and it seems that Songbird supports MP3 devices, and there was an extension for an iPod. Might check that out too. It is also supported on Windows, Linux and Mac. Given I am considering purchasing a Macbook Pro, this is nice as well.
Here is the featureset. As I said, check it out. I will update with opinions on the other features as I utilize them.
Just discovered a Songbird screencast as an intro for it. Very cool.
Is the songbird mascot continually passing gas?
Hmmm, not sure what ya mean.
I have been using it for local music and shoutcast for a day now. Like it better than Windows Media Player, iTunes or Winamp for that. If it would subscribe to podcasts – that would be nice. It might, just have not discovered it yet.