What Kind of Music do you Listen To?
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Everyone close your eyes, and think of what would happen if Firefox made love to iTunes. After the gestation period, we would likely see something like Songbird. What is Songbird? Basically, it’s exactly as I said… imagine that your web browser and your favorite music tool have gotten together to create something new.
Songbird media player is a highly customizable alternative to traditional desktop media players. It can not only help you manage the music that you already have, it can help you discover other music that’s out there on the Web. It’s an integrated experience. I know, you already use a media management tool. Yeah.. but you use some company’s media manager tool. They tend to be driven by corporations. They tend to shove all these partnerships down your throat?
What if you just want to manage your music? What if you just want to discover new music? What if you just want something that’s completely open-source, built by the community? What if you just wanted to subscribe to your favorite music blogs and get notified automatically when a new song is released? Ah hah! This is where Songbird comes in. Since it’s free, it’s worth an shot isn’t it?
This new version has integrated SHOUTCast. If you’ve never used a SHOUTCast stream before, it’s definitely worth using. You don’t have to use it of course. If you aren’t familiar with it, SHOUTcast is a free Internet radio service.
Songbird is cross-platform, so you can use it on any machine without a snag. It’s very straightforward. Out of the box, it has a clean black interface, but you can create skins if you want to. There are some pretty cool bookmarks already embedded with it, that you can of course edit or delete should you choose.
Download it, give it a shot and let me know what you think.
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11 Comments
cananito
June 14th, 2008
at 10:36pm
I really loved the idea of a iTunes alternative, I even blogged about it, gave you credit chris. But even tough iTunes is kinda sucky in some stuff, I still prefer it over other programs of it’s kind, in this case Songbird, I took the time to install it, it just didn’t give me the whole experience.
lilxkid24
June 14th, 2008
at 10:40pm
i would say its pretty good nice skin black, but the internet seems a lil bit slower than firefox dunno why. Overall its pretty good since i like to listen to music and browse web at same time
Argos
June 15th, 2008
at 2:33am
With its add-ons I liked it and all but, I like to be able to manipulate the way how sound is being heared: equalizer!!!
#1 no equalizer. Is there a way by using other software, to equalize the sound in one’s computer?
#2 Ram usage. the program uses like two and a half more ram than the last version of winamp. This is not so good.
Anyway, what I liked it the most was that i was able to download a lot of album covers for my music collection. So… this is it.
Virtualization of Marketing
June 15th, 2008
at 6:12am
What Kind of Music do you Listen To?
vistadude
June 15th, 2008
at 7:42am
I like media monkey for a music browser, but I got to say song bird has something going for it, I like it to
Joelg88
June 15th, 2008
at 7:55am
Songbird is great. I like how it looks. It has a good clean looking interface. It works great too. Its in Alpha and it hasnt even crashed on me yet. Its also very light on resources. Its cool that you can browse the web right in songbird. But i dont think i’ll be using that feature. I’ll be sticking with Safari for Windows and Firefox as my browsers. But still its a great media player and i’ll be keeping it. I also like its shoutcast support so thats really nice. But overall its a good media player.
Computerwhiz1
June 16th, 2008
at 4:12am
Chris Pirillo Do You Want to Remove USB Flash Drive Software? Do you Record or Watch Machinima? Palm vs iPhone Do you Have a Windows 7 Features Wishlist?What Kind of Music do you Listen To?
David Panych
June 17th, 2008
at 12:45pm
Songbird is easy to use. My dad is not into computers at all and does not have any experience, when I first introduced him to songbird he said that it was “easy to use.” But for me i will stick with just itunes with my media player.
King Lacho
June 21st, 2008
at 12:07am
Thanks for the post, Chris. I downloaded, installed and tried the software, and found it really interesting. But, still, I did find some problems about it. Mainly it is not about the program itself, as it is quite useful, the main problem I have with it is the fact of its reduced variety of artists and/or styles.
I’m more of a fan of underground music (mostly black/death metal and electronic/techno/industrial/gothic/rock) and did not find some artists whose music I really love. But besides that, it’s a fine program, and, just like I stated on a form they ask you to fill detailing why you are uniinstalling, I am willing to try it once again, as long as they expand the variety of music that is included.
King Lacho
June 21st, 2008
at 12:14am
Well, I did try Songird out, I just have to say that I had a little problem with the variety of the music that it displayed, mostly since I am more likely a fan of music styles like Black/Death/Power/Progressive Metal, or some rock, or even some Electronic/Techno/Industrial, and even Gothic music, so when searching for some artists whose music I love, but are not so commercial, I had not as much of luck as I wish I had.
Nevertheless, I still do think that if they expand their variety a little bit more, then it would be lovely to try it once again.
timothy
June 22nd, 2008
at 9:07pm
is songbird affiliated with that legal music download thing called qtrax cause I have qtrax and it says songbird when I open it