Songbird

Posted on March 10th, 2007 by Richard K Miller

If you're new to Freemacware.com and like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or signup for our emails at the right. We'll send you one Mac freeware application every day. Thanks for visiting!

Songbird is an open source jukebox and media player that “promises to be the Firefox of media players.” Being a jukebox puts it squarely in competition with iTunes, but Songbird offers some unique features that make it worth a look even for hardcore Mac users. (It also runs on other platforms.)

The interface will remind you of iTunes and it’s easy enough to navigate. It can play MP3 and AAC files, but also Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WMA. (Of course, it can’t play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store.) It’s built on the same platform as Firefox and will eventually, likewise, offer extensions so you can customize it as much as Firefox. Songbird includes a built-in web browser, which is actually better than you might think. If you browse to a web page that has a podcast or music linked to it, Songbird automatically finds these files and offers to add them to your library.

Songbird hasn’t even reached version 1.0, but it’s already shaping up to be something great and has lots of cool features. I’m excited to see where it goes.

UPDATE: Though I couldn’t get it to work at first go, Jonas wrote to tell me that Songbird can indeed play DRM’ed songs from the iTunes Music Store via the Quicktime plugin.

Screenshot