Songbird (Intel) 0.6.1
Songbird is a media browser and Web player built from Firefox, VLC Player, and SQLite. Songbird is open source and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Version 0.6 adds better support for large libraries, smoothing scrolling through libraries, faster filtering, speedier search, improvement memory managment, and new features like metadata writing, better MTPSync support, and the ability to find text on Web pages. If Firefox and iTunes hooked up, their hatchling could very well be Songbird. Although it's in beta and plenty buggy, it's also a very fun app that's part music player, part Web browser, and all about music discovery, management, and playback. During installation, it'll ask if you want to load your iTunes music directory or another media directory, or perform the task later. Processing 5,000 songs took about 3 minutes, not a bad pace. It then asks you which of the pre-installed Songbird extensions you want to load. Most of these, like the iPod and USB device manager, only make the app stronger.
Songbird has a growing library of extensions, and support is slowly growing for those written originally for Firefox. Many of the improvements from the last version make for a dramatic change, but Songbird is definitely a beta: caveat emptor. Still, it could really take flight for the music-loving, Web-surfing fanatic in all of us.
