Have other Street Techies messed around with Songbird yet? It’s a media browser build on a chewy Mozilla center. It’s pretty cool. You can import your iTunes, and other local media libraries, and you can scour the Web for media (music search engines are built in). One of the nifty things it does is, when you hit, say a music blog, it looks for MP3 (and other) audio files on that page and presents them to you as a playlist, below the regular page content, so that playlist sorta becomes a soundtrack to the content you’re reading. If you decide you like a track, you can drag it into your library (and you can subscribe to RSS feeds). It allows you to do many of the things you can do in iTunes. No CD import and burning yet, but it’s coming, as is other extensions. And no, it won’t talk to your iPod.
I sorta don’t know why you’d want a separate media browser, but it’s nice to have an open source alternative to iTunes and Win Media Player. I sorta wish this was just a Firefox plug-in. I bet this would be a dream app if you were a music junkie who spent a lot of time reading the indie music press and blogs and scanning the Web for new music and vids. I like how their bird mascot is always farting. Classy.
The app is cross-platform (Mac, Win, Linux), but only on release 0.2.1, so only for early app adopters.
Here’s an interview that Xeni did with the developers when 0.1 was released back in February.
