Songbird: the open source media player

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

If, like me, you despise iTunes with a passion, this could be the player for you. It’s called Songbird, and it’s an open source alternative to the big, bloated media players that dominate the market. Powered by Mozilla, it’s could soon be the Firefox of media software.

It works with iPods and your existing iTunes library, and integrates with YouTube, ShoutCast, Last.fm and other media-related apps. It links to concert tickets for artists in your library, supports FairPlay tracks, works on Windows or Macs and even has an integrated web browser.

All sorts of extra features are in beta, as the Songbird website details, and you can also download add-ons in the same way as you currently do with Firefox – so the possibilities for expansion are immense.

Version 1.0.0 was officially launched yesterday, and I’ve downloaded it to see how it puts up with my terrible music taste, so look out for a full review soon.

UPDATE: Read the full review of songbird 1.0 here.