Almost everyone who uses computers, listens to music at one moment or the other. The ones who listen to music often are generally confused about which is the best player for audio files. I myself have tried atleast 5 of them in the past year or so ( and this by no means the maximum number you can achieve!). Today I noticed that the quest has somewhat lost momentum not because of my diminishing interests in Music but due the wonderful solution I found that fits in perfectly to all my needs.
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Quickly which player is this? |
I am talking about Songbird. Heard of it? Already using it? No? Lets have a look at what Songbird has to offer and then decide whether you like it or not!
- First things first, what you will notice at the first glance is that Songbird interface is very similar to iTunes interface ( some inspiration. ha?)
- Digging in a little deeper you come to know that Songbird is actually based on Mozilla technology. Its open source (another reason I love it), and both the desktop as well as the web APIs are available to the developers. But what does this mean if you are not a developer. In means that in near future you will see a lot of customizations and addons for Songbird
- Songbird supports addons just like firefox. Some have gone so far as to call it the "Firefox of media players". Till date there are 170+ addons which are only going to skyrocket in future.
- Songbird allows you to browse the web as you are listening to music. All this can be performed in a separate tab. Yes it supports tabs also!
- You can download music from iTunes, Amazon Mp3 and eMusic.
- It offers different views of your media. If you are like me and hate the spreadsheet like look of your media library then this feature is for you.
- Skinning support
- Play count and skip tracking.
- Supports your iPod and other portable players
- You can listen to music, enjoy web media, manage your downloads, view history, catch podcasts everything from a single window
- Songbird is available in 40+ languages
- Supports a variety of formats: MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA and many more.
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Installing Addons – FF like! |
Songbird already has 1M + installations and these are growing fast. Many Electronic and media content providers are targeting songbird for their digital media services.
Lets leave you with a quote from the songbird site:
Play music. Play the Web.
Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.
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Songbird screen shots |
Cool ha? What do you think? Do you like some other player that you would like to share with us?