Songbird - A Music Lover's Friend

Posted by Chad Criswell Oct 8, 2006

Open source software has brought us many great products, some that have changed the way we use the Internet. For music lovers Songbird may be one such product. Songbird is essentially a web browser, built on the code of the popular Firefox browser, formerly called Netscape. Songbird is more than just a browser, however. Songbird has features that are specifically intended for music lovers. Any page that you visit while using Songbird will be scanned for audio files. When music is found on a page a window opens at the bottom of the browser window allowing you to download and play the music without leaving the page. If you regularly visit blog sites where music is reviewed Songbird can take the work out of searching for the links and save those links for you to access at any time.

The default interface for Songbird is, to put it bluntly, boring. It essentially looks like iTunes slapped on top of Firefox with a dull black and grey color scheme. The other included set of feathers is equally boring on the white side. Songbird also accepts extentions the way Firefox does but in my tests I could not get it to work. Tabbed browsing is also not included with Songbird although it appears there are plans to add it in future releases.

From all the hype about Songbird I was expecting to see a product that would enhance and empower my musical travels on the Internet. After testing it for a few days I can say that while the music searching capabilities and audio player functions are nice, they are not enough to make me switch to Songbird for my daily browsing. I have to wonder if it would not have been possible just to put these features into a standard extension for the existing Firefox browser and then be able to have the best of both worlds.