In February 2006, the Songbird open source project was launched by some developers who previously worked for Winamp and Yahoo! Music Engine. More than just an alternative media player, Songbird should also benefit from the proliferation of media on the Web with the integration of a real browser. With this in mind, Songbird uses the Gecko rendering engine and runtime environment Mozilla (XULRunner). In addition, the reader has a library of plugins to extend its functionality with for example the integration of Last.fm to download information about an artist, LyricMaster to read lyrics or MediaFlow for a similar interface CoverFlow in iTunes.
In his passage version 0.7, the software was given a new graphical interface, very close to that of iTunes. Moreover, since it is compatible with several types of audio formats and several mobile devices (including iPod), Songbird appears to many as the real alternative to Apple's flagship software.
To provide a multimedia platform more reliable and efficient, this new version is based on the GStreamer manager, already used by the environments Gnome and KDE Linux. In addition to new keyboard shortcuts, it is now possible to drag an image perspective on the panel sticker album being listening. Finally, the overall performance of the software have been optimized and the development team promises a media import 2 to 4 times faster than for earlier versions. You can read the complete list in the release notes.
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