10 Songbird Extensions You Should Not Miss

Some time back I wrote about songbird. The Mozilla media player. I also briefly mentioned the ability to add extensions just like Firefox. Well as it turns out I have been addicted to the player and have already compiled a list of my favorite extensions for Songbird.

 

1. AlbumApplet

The album applet allows you to browse your songs library by means of album art. Its similar to the Cover Flow animation of iTunes and iPod Touch fame. Don’t have album art for all of your albums? No problems the extension will get it for you and then save the requried information along with your media!
Get It!

2. MinimizeToTray

Minimizes Songbird into the system tray. It also displays a notification when a new song is played. Like it very very much. Its a port of the MinimizeToTray extension for Firefox and Thunder bird. Linux users can try the FireTray extension.
Get It!

3. Attack of the Clones

This extension adds another media flow to songbird that displays duplicate files in your media library, that way you can find them and remove them to reclaim some disk space. You can also click the “Kill the Clones!” button to indiscriminately delete the duplicates.
Get It!

4. GhostBusters

Actually a follow up of the above extension that displays broken or non existent tracks in your library. Again a good one for media management.
Get It!

5. Now Playing List

This addon adds a now playing list that gives you the ability to add songs to the queue. A good one for those with large libraries and those who hate to make playlists like me!
Get It!

6. YouPlayer

This is an addon for those of you who like to watch videos on video websites like YouTube. The extension opens up a nice window where you can watch and download videos from the web. You can drag a link to a browser window or right-click it and open in a new tab. You can add/drag other links, thus the playlist will work as a bookmarker.
Get It!

7. Metrics Media Page

It allows you to visualize your library. You can see your collection in living colour. Graph different properties on pie and bar charts to discover the anatomy of your collection. See how long a playlist is, or how much disk space it takes up. Look at how your music collection has developed over time.Get It!

8. Background

This will allow you to change songbird’s background with an image or a color and make other changes to UI elements. Looks very cool. You can use any image to style up your bird!
Get It

9. BirdTitle

This extension allows you to change Songbird’s window title to whatever you want, such as the current song being played, make track information scroll on your taskbar and act as a track change notifier.
Get It!

10. Flickr Extension

This addon displays a slideshow of pictures related to the media you are playing. Nice if you don’t have anything else to do while listening songs!
Get It!

What are your favorite songbird extension? or feathers? What features would you like to see?

 

Related: Firefox Custom Branding

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Video Annotations come to YouTube

Video Annotations have finally made their way into Youtube. Yes yesterday youtube rolled out its own tool for annotations. You can now add speech bubbles, commentary, highlights or notes to any part of the video. That’s ofcourse if you uploaded the video. Yep the annotation feature is for the uploader of the video only for the moment. Here is a look at what I am talking about just incase I didn’t tune into your frequency till now!

Now annotations in videos have had mixed reactions on other sites. For one thing why put speech bubbles when its already a video? But I say it just adds a little humour if used in that sense. Notes etc can be used to add commentary and highlight a point that may be overlooked by the viewer. So are annotations to be viewed as “I don’t want to record again and I don’t want to edit, so lets put in annotations” ?

Na not really. Take a look at these videos you will know what I mean. Annotations used for a good purpose here although the tricks(video content) are well…. lets put it this way… everyone knows the tricks used to create these tricks! Have a look:

Annotations are good or bad? required or a gimmick? Well you decide. Its a feature you may like or may not and incase you are in the latter bunch you can turn off annotations on any video by just clicking on a button in the bottom right corner of the player.

Personally, I like them but I would want to be able to annotate others’ videos too(you can do it on other sites). So come on YouTube

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