Singing The Praises Of Songbird 1.0

THERE'S no shortage of quality music player/jukebox software available on the internet and in the past I've used iTunes, Amarok, Rhythmbox, Exaile, Audacious and several others.

But Songbird is something quite different.

Songbird is an audio player and music collection manager built using the same Mozilla XML user interface language (XUL) and Gecko rendering engine that power Firefox.

It's a cross-platform program, with versions for Linux, Mac and Windows.

If you're a Linux user you may find it in your distribution's repository but I know for a fact it's not in the Ubuntu repository because I looked when I set about installing Songbird on my CrunchBang Linux 8.10.01 system.

Instead, I downloaded the .deb file from the community maintained GetDeb website.
Now, let me save fellow CrunchBangers the hassle of discovering that, before you install the .deb package, you must have a couple of lib files installed - libgtkglext1 and libxul0d.

These can be installed from the Ubuntu repository using Synaptic. Then enter a terminal, CD to the directory containing the Songbird package and, as root, do:

dpkg --install songbird_1.0.0-0~getdeb1_i386.deb

When you first run Songbird you point it toward your music collection and it creates your Songbird library, then the main gui loads and.. it looks really familiar.

It's a bit iTunes, a bit Firefox. There's a tabbed web browser and, like Firefox, a large number of addons to add functionality and diversions.

Songbird ships with six initial add-ons that a brief setup wizard helps users to get started with: iPod Device Support, QuickTime Playback, SHOUTcast Radio, Concerts, Last.fm and mashTape.

This means that, out of the box, Songbird can synchronise with an iPod as well as a several other music-playing devices and mobile phones (but not the iPhone, iPod Touch or Zune, although support for these devices is being worked on).

I found a couple of other interesting addons - Lyricmaster, which drags the lyrics for your current track off the internet, and MediaFlow, which does the same job of displaying album art as Cover Flow in iTunes.

I found MediaFlow slowed things down a little so I eventually uninstalled it, but I'm otherwise delighted with the way Songbird works; it's very stable, incredibly versatile and I particularly love the media display running along the bottom of the player which offers up artist biogs, reviews, photos and even YouTube videos - now that's web integration for you!
As with Firefox, you can customise the look of Songbird by installing a new theme or 'feather', as they're called - I have a couple of glossy black feathers installed to match the dark, moody theme of my CrunchBang Linux desktop.
Another excellent feature in Songbird is the web browser - when you load a page Songbird automatically scans it for audio files, which appear in a list at the bottom of your browser window in downloadable format.
Songbird is still under heavy development, with lots of new features being planned for future releases, and I can't help feeling I have only just scratched the surface of this excellent application.

As far as I can tell, there's no option yet to have Songbird scan your music folder recursively for recently added material, but I believe that is one of several new feature in the pipeline.

Oh, and I forgot to mention - Songbird is Open Source software.. another great reason to give it a try.