Songbird Plays the Musical Web
The Songbird player, developed by a small company called Pioneers of the Inevitable here in San Francisco, is an integrated media player slash web browser. On the surface, it looks like a full-featured audio player (meaning it looks like iTunes), complete with playlist management and a slick UI. But there’s also a web browsing component. The end result is a browser that downloads, plays, and manages your audio files. Putting all of this stuff into one interface is a bit of a dream come true for web music junkies.
Songbird is built using the Mozilla browser engine, so it has all of the same functionality as Mozilla, including support for XUL and extensions. Songbird also excels as a media player. It can handle MP3, MP4/M4a, FLAC, WMA, Ogg, AAC, and several other audio file types. The FLAC compatibility makes downloading and listening to live shows from Archive.org that much more pleasurable.
One of the cooler features is the web-page-as-playlist function. Songbird automatically recognizes whether or not a web page has any linked sound files. When you visit a page with playable sound files, Songbird will build a little Web Playlist at the bottom of the browser window where you can immediately experience the music on offer. You can also set Songbird to watch sites that regularly post tracks, then update your playlists as the tracks go live.
Songbird is available for Windows right now, with OS X and Linux/Unix versions available soon. They also have a blog.
