I first heard about Songbird via an article at Cnet, oh I’m not sure maybe back during the first part of 2008. I really liked the fact that it’s built on top of Firefox, being the Firefox fan (note that I didn’t say fanboy =)) that I am. You have add-on support and available skins for installation called feathers, they are available directly inside of Songbird via the browser. Yes that’s right, this nice media player has it’s own browser. All you need to do is open the add-ons menu, then click “Get more extensions”. That web page open in it’s own tab from within Songbird, from there it’s just like Firefox, click the big install button, click the install button in the popup dialog and then restart. I really like that kind of simplicity.
Installation is very straightforward and if you can choose from Fairplay playback and WMA DRM playback support among a few others. In my case, once the Fairplay playback support is installed it will try to detect if you have iTunes installed. If you have, it’ll give you the opportunity to import your iTunes library, very nice and simple. You can add tracks to your iTunes library and Songbird can scan for library changes such as track adds or removal and make those changes to your Songbird library. It also has profile support for some multiuser love. The only drawback to this is that once Apple decides that they need or want to upgrade Fairplay DRM, it will most likely break Fairplay support in Songbird. Also you must have iTunes and Quicktime already installed for it to work properly. I did try having Quicktime 7.5 installed without iTunes, but my tracks from iTunes weren’t playing properly. Once reinstalling iTunes + Quicktime and those files starting playing properly again. Hmm notice how much Songbird looks like iTunes? Actually, the bar at the top containing the playback controls as you see in the picture below is placed at the bottom by default and a setting change moves that to the top as you see here.
All in all I’d have to give Songbird 1.0 a 4 out 5 for it’s extensibility, great audio quality and the large burgeoning commuinity surrounding it.
Posted by John B 
