Songbird Music Player

[Larry ward]

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that's under active development and it makes finding music easy online, has been updated with new features and bug fixes.If you've been looking for a new way to listen to music on your computer, Songbird has a lot to recommend it. Unlike iTunes, which Songbird's developers have ridiculed as being too much like a spreadsheet, the program contains an unrestricted web browser for streaming and downloading tunes from music blogs and other sources, many of which are included as links or bookmarks within the program.

The Songbird media player, which aims to become the Firefox of jukebox software, continues to progress with recent builds focusing on performance enhancements. In case you’re unaware, Songbird is a web-enabled media player that makes it dead easy to browse, download and manage all of the media files out there on the web. Think of it as a mix of Firefox and iTunes. Songbird is one of our favorite music apps, but sadly its performance is subpar when faced with a sizable music library. Thankfully, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the company behind Songbird, recently released a nightly build demonstrating some impressive performance gains with large libraries.

Features

Media Playback

Songbird supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac.

Gapless Playback & Replay Gain

Skips padding data due to encoding and chains files for gapless playback experience. Adjusts the playback gain appropriately if a track's metadata contains replay gain information.

Smart Playlists

Create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you set.

Web Browser

Songbird includes an integrated web browser with features like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and more.

Album Artwork

Display the currently playing track's album art and write new artwork back to the file. Automatically fetch missing album art from the web.

Media Importing

Add media to Songbird by importing from your file system or iTunes

Multi-language Support

Over 25 completed, community-contributed localizations and growing!

[Larry ward]

The performance gains will be most noticeable in the Linux and Windows versions of Songbird where developers have turned on some of the same memory optimization tools found in Firefox 3. The Songbird blog claims that the performance improvement is “about 15-20 percent, depending on task.”

With Singerbird, you can pick and choose music to stream from the blog without having to hunt for the links and click on them manually. You can download the MP3 within the main window, or choose to purchase it from Amazon MP3, Amie Street, eMusic or iTunes. While you're listening, you can also jump straight to the entry in the blog about that song.

Singerbird is available for download on internet.

[Dodger]

its almost a separate installation of firefox with a media player addon of some sort but running it i got the 'feeling' its using java... Anyways would like to try it once..

[Shikhar]

Genre, Artist and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. They streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.