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Media players for the PC are a dime a dozen with a few more thrown in as special offers. In other words there’s plenty to go around and most, if not all are free. Songbird, an open-source player, may be still under development but I decided to go ahead and see what it had to offer already. Here’s a little look and feel of this wildly customizable music player for your PC. The best part about this player is the Add-on features that are freely available. The player is intensely customizable unlike any of the regular music players like iTunes, Winamp or even Windows Media Player for that matter. Of course the developers haven’t been able to incorporate video playback just yet but their promise, according to their roadmap at least, is that when they’re done tweaking the audio player to the max video playback is next on the list. The fact is they’re still working out e a few minor kinks and trying to create a ‘non-proprietary, cross platform’ for managing our music across the board. To put it simply, it’s a work in progress. The player does have it’s similarities to iTunes, that’s painfully clear on start up. But given the choices of interface customization it offers, if you’re not a fan of Apple’s player, you can fix Songbird to you’re taste and preference. However some of the skins I’ll have to admit do once again look a bit familiar to iTunes. At least in this case you can alter the colors and backgrounds of the player to your liking. Songbird is a comfortable player to use but honestly doesn’t yet offer anything out of the ordinary in terms of playback and audio customization. The interface, whichever you choose is, however, very simplistic and doesn’t stray too far from being hard to follow. It’s easy to navigate and search, import and manage your music once you’ve gotten through the initial stages of getting to know the shortcut keys for music. It’s a web based player. But that’s not news enough to get excited about. Where it leaves the other players that also offer the same kind of web integration for the basics like internet radio, Shoutcast and last.fm which are part and parcel of the set up, is the fact that it offers a full web browsing experience and is not restricted to just sites for music download sites and such. With Songbird running it’s not absolutely necessary to have a web browser active as well. You can get all your work done from here while organizing your audio and or just listening to music or internet radio. What does make a serious 'player' to contend with is the fact that browser it uses is Firefox. There’s still a lot more to come of course as the browser still lacks a few things here and there but it seems like the developers are working on that too. It’ll be extremely versatile to have a singular engine running instead of having to navigate away one and then to another. I did find a few glitches with the browser though. For one thing www.in.com refused to open but it did always manage to open the mobile site instead though. All the time! A couple of my office business accounts also had issues opening as well. Hopefully a later version will iron these wrinkles out. Another very interesting feature about the software is that while playing tracks you can have a Content Pane open under the library that will pick up all the information available on the artist and or album etc. It also links in to YouTube and locates all videos with the artist’s name. This is just one of the many many add-ons that have been created for this player. iPod integration has not been perfected for the iPhone or iTouch but it works just fine with other iPods. Sadly my PC has issues with demand and supply of speed when I need it the most and I noticed that the more I ‘Added- on’ the slower the player got. So choose wisely, but trust me, once you get started making this player your own, it’s damned hard to stop. I’m still getting used to it but loving every minute of customizing it to my finicky tastes. |
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