Law Students

Songbird - Mozilla’s Open Source Music Player

By Athar Khan

I was a big fan of Winamp. At the time, nothing played digital media that well with such a small memory footprint. But slowly, I have moved to iTunes. It started out with my first iPod. I used iTunes to sync music with it. iTunes was one of the few free MP3 encoders which used the original Fraunhofer Institute codec so I started encoding my CDs with it as well. I love how advanced iTunes can get with daisy-chained smart playlists and other settings. Not to mention, it downloads podcasts, my contacts, calendar, and email to my iPhone. The only thing I wished iTunes would do is to have a smaller memory footprint. Even though iTunes sometimes felt a little bloated, I moved from Winamp to iTunes completely.

Now there is a new application made by Mozilla called Songbird. The application looks remarkably like iTunes (hey, if it worked with FireFox and IE, then why not repeat that same formula, right?) and has features that pretty much mirror what iTunes offers. What I had to do with the Mac Automator, Songbird can do natively with “Watched Folders.”

Given how Mozilla has fared with FireFox and Thunderbird, my guess is that Songbird will also do well. Not only is the app open-source, it is also being backed by Sequoia Capital — the company that funded Google.

I just downloaded it and will try it out for a few days. You can get it at www.getsongbird.com.

Full post as published by Atharkhan on November 16, 2008 (boomark / email).