How to Truly Enjoy Your Music with Songbird
For those frustrated with iTunes’ terrible performance on PC–or any other inadequate music player for that matter–you need to check out Songbird. Built on Mozilla Firefox architecture, it works so well it’s been the best music experience I’ve had on a PC to date.
It’s open source, which means that it’s improving on a daily basis by a wide range of people, with regular releases every few weeks. It also works beautifully on PC, Mac, or Linux.
Customize your music experience with useful and stable add-ons, just like Firefox extensions:
mashTape shows Wikipedia info, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Google News, and more for each artist.
Concerts show upcoming local shows based upon the artists you have in your music library.
LyricMaster provides seamlessly integrated lyrics.
Last.FM scrobbing, useful music recommendations, album art manager, twitter integration, and so many more in constant development.
And of course, these features that go above and beyond a standard music player functionality:
- Media playback of most media files, including MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, WMA, WMA w/ DRM, AAC, and iTunes Fairplay (which I could never play outside of iTunes)
- More device support than iTunes, with teams of programmers working to improve and add new devices on a regular basis.
- Excellent performance and stability. No matter how many times I re-installed iTunes, it would attempt to re-import and re-organize my entire 80GB music library. This means I couldn’t start playing music for about 20 minutes every time I started the program. Songbird effortlessly scrolls, sorts, and searches my library as if it was only 8GB instead of 80GB.
See a full description of the first full release of Songbird (1.0) here.
Download Songbird here and enjoy your music!
