nonsmokingarea.com

sometime last night, the Songbird-developers hatched released version 0.2 Test Flight, therefor lifting the Mozilla-based opensource audio-player officialy into Beta. Songbird comes with a built-in Wikipedia-plugin, a cool example of what the integration of browser & player can do: browsing artist-pages in Wikipedia, Songbird automatically offers all linked audio-tracks/samples for playback. the new Audioscrobbler-extension connects Songbird with Last.fm. unfortunately, Songbird is still quite a memory-hog - seems that’s what we need to get used to. binaries for win32, mac osx & linux are waiting for being tried out!

Songbird’s source-repository was opened for public access today. Songbird is an opensource audio-player & -manager based on firefox’ HTML-rendering-engine and XUL-framework. besides opening the repository, the Songbird-team released binaries (pre0.2) for windows, linux and mac os (that’s a premiere for linux & mac).

despite looking like a black iTunes-clone at first glance, Songbird introduces innovative concepts for browsing websites containing audio-data. the integrated browser automatically extracts linked audio-files and offers them for one-click-download to the library. the pre0.2 release of Songbird looks promising - if you don’t want to install the software to your computer, I recommend watching these screenscasts to get an impression of its features.