Windows Tools, Help & Guides

[Ed note] Recently, we suggested seven free alternatives to iTunes and Songbird made the list. In this guide, we take a look at why this media player is so good.

This funky Free music player gets you geared up and keeps you conscience clean.

Songbird is a Web Player—a music program on your computer that utilises the internet constantly to give you many features. This makes Songbird superior to other major players as you can view artist bio’s, lyrics, concerts and videos as you listen to them. Then upload your files to you music player or mobile or publish what your listening to your IM, twitter or last.fm account for your friends to see. Pretty damn cool eh?

Did I mention it monitors your music directory and actively imports and corrects files locations for songs?

Read on for the list of life-saving features, cool add-ons and smooth skins.

Songbird is an open-source music player for Windows and Mac OSX. It has been developed by team members who worked on Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine with the aim of making it the first web-player.

To support this, there is no other player that I’ve used that supports as many file formats (MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA, WAV / H.264, Windows Media Video, MPEG4 /  BMP, GIF, JPEG, and PNG)  as well as 70 languages and 574 add-ons (including feathers(skins), playback, web browser, content and tools).

Songbird is clean and swiftly functional. If you don’t like the look of the original feather, just head to “View->Feathers->Get More Feathers…” and a tab is opened up within the player on the right page and ready to download. Downloading is similar to Firefox (as it is built on Mozilla as Firefox is) so all additions are downloaded and integrated automatically with in minute.

All of the add-ons are installed in this way and they offer such depth to the experience that it is the main calling card and advantage above all other players.

There are a multitude of phones that support Song bird off the shelf these days (notably Motorola’s Android).  There is an add-on for MTP devices also, so if you have a custom device, say an iRiver or mini player of some sort, this should work fine for you. The iPod add-on sadly hasn’t been working for me,  updates stopped some 9 months ago (it stopped working a few versions ago).

On top of everything else, I can say from using multiple players constantly over the years (making playlists for the cafe I work at,) Songbird is damn stable. Constantly chopping, changing and exporting playlists can have a lot of issues in other players, especially if music is misplaced or playlists export/ imported. There are none here with Songbird monitoring and correction every song and movement in your library.

If you have a player that you love then that is fine, but give me the benefit of the doubt and try Songbird. If you r a music lover that wants to find similar artists and keep up to date with your favorites, this was basically built for you.

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