There’s been a lot of hype surrounding the release of Songbird, the “…non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music”. The reviews I’ve read all point to the customisation aspect of Songbird that makes it appealing.
Long ago I used FoxyTunes in Firefox to fetch song information and, more importantly, lyrics for my current song. This was great until Yahoo! acquired FoxyTunes and made the lyrics point away from the LyricWiki website to their own database of lyrics. I can understand why they’d do this as lyrics are owned by the respective record companies and as such you need to gain permission to reprint them. I can imagine LyricWiki being under a bit of pressure to legalise its database and I’m sure Yahoo! after acquiring FoxyTunes, wouldn’t want to bear the burden of being sued by everyone and their uncle. So, the LyricWiki association in FoxyTunes was removed I couldn’t get lyrics for lesser known artists such as Self, Kemopetrol or Reuben.
Songbird changes all of that. Through a third-party extension I can now browse the lyricwiki database amongst a whole host of other features. Like FoxyTunes you can browse pictures from flickr, videos from Youtube and recieve news from Google, but from within the music player itself. As it’s built from Firefox code it has the same browsing capabilities built in. Add to that the ability to download all available tracks on a page with a single click and what you essentially have is a Firefox based around music, in the same sense that Flock is Firefox with social networking.
Other features that I really like is the last.fm integration, global hotkeys (a reason I’d been using Winamp for so long) and iPod support, though not sure how long that will last as its legality is questionable.
On the flipside Songbird has a few problems to sort out. Like Firefox it eats RAM for breakfast, it is prone to freezing if you search through songs too quicklky and it can’t scrobble tracks from Shoutcast Radio stations, though this may be a problem with last.fm and not Songbird.
My overall view of Songbird is that which I have on all open source projects. It’s like a newborn child: in it’s early years it’ll take and take and give very little in return, but if you help it develop it’ll grow to be a mature, working piece of software… or child… or whatever.
