Apple’s iTunes offers a number of ways to listen to your music on various Apple devices, but what if you just want to stream some music to where ever you happen to be? For instance, you’re at work, you music collection is at home, what do you do?

There are number of things you can do, but one possible answer is to use the SlimServer software from Logitech. Although SlimServer was specifically written for use with the company’s companion hardware line of “Squeeze” devices, Logictech was kind enough to open source the server code.

Because the SlimServer software is open source, cross platform and free it makes a good music streaming solution regardless of what platform you choose to implement it on (SlimServer is supported on Windows, OS X and some Linux flavors, I’ve been running mine on an Ubuntu server with no problems).

Continue Reading “How To: Listen to Your Music Anywhere” »

Our favorite almost-there media player, Songbird, has reached another milestone with version 0.4 and a new push to port your favorite Firefox extensions over to Songbird. This week begins what the Songbird team is calling the Songbird Top 40, a six-week campaign to port the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions into Songbird.

For those who haven’t yet stuck a toe in the Songbird waters, the application is one part iTunes and one part Firefox — imagine iTunes with a built-in web browser and MP3 blog scraping tools. Because Songbird uses the same underlying engine as Firefox, with a little tweaking your favorite Firefox extensions will function inside the media player.

There are of course Songbird-specific add-ons, like tools for importing your iTunes Library or managing music on your iPod, but the potential to integrate existing Firefox add-ons has, until now, remained largely theoretical.

Continue Reading “Songbird Top 40 Project Wants to Integrate Your Favorite Firefox Add-ons” »