In a nutshell, Songbird is a music player/organizer that supports plug-ins, making it highly customizable. It does seem like a twin to iTunes, so if you’re an iTunes user, Songbird will be a breeze for you to use. Songbird has its own features but a lot of the things it can do now are because of the add-ons. The following is a short list of what you can do with it.
1. Feathers (Skins or Themes)
Songbird uses the same cool features available on Firefox like “feathers” or themes. When Songbird first came out, there were already some feathers available, including dark themes and a Windows Aero look. There are many more available now, thanks to the many members of Songbird’s user community who like to showcase their creativity and individuality.
2. Tabbed Browsing
Tabbed browsing is one capability Songbird shares with most web browsers of today. While changing your settings in one tab and checking out feathers in another, you can be listening to a song from your music library on yet another tab. This is some cool music multi-tasking.
3. Smart Playlists
With Songbird’s smart playlists, you can be as particular as you want when defining the criteria for what goes into your playlists, like genre, artist, year, size etc. Your smart playlists will also update automatically if you set them so.
4. Subscribe to MP3 Blogs as Playlists
You can turn a music blog into a playlist with Songbird. When you subscribe to a music blog, it will appear as a playlist, and then you can choose to save it in one of your own folders and set how often for Songbird to check the site. Every time Songbird checks that blog/page, it will automatically download new songs to your chosen folder.
5. Turn a Web Page into a Playlist
If Songbird can turn a music blog into a playlist, it can do the same with any web page that contains any playable music files. This is a unique feature of Songbird’s integrated web browser. Songbird is perfect for finding new music online, and like the subscribe feature, it will download newfound songs into your chosen folder.
6. Find and Display Related Media
Mashtape allows you to find or discover anything and everything on the web related to the artist whose song you are currently playing. These include YouTube videos, Google news, Flickr photos, Last.fm biographies, etc.
7. Last.fm
Songbird does Last.fm scrobbling really well. It tracks and remembers what you’re listening to and it also tracks those songs you listened to while you were offline. These histories are to be submitted to Last.fm when you get back online where they all get added to your profile. You can also rate and tag songs while they are playing.
8. 7Digital Integration
Songbird’s integration with 7Digital, one of the most popular online music stores is probably one of its coolest features. A lot of people like 7Digital because of their low prices. Songbird lets you log into 7Digital from your music player where you can purchase or download songs into your computer. Your downloaded songs immediately go to your music library.
9. Equalizer
An equalizer is composed of electronic filters that let you adjust the tone or frequency response of your sound system. Typically, equalizers have a fixed bass and treble setting, so you are only able to go up or down those set frequencies. In comparison, Songbird has a 10-band equalizer! This lets you adjust the sound that your ears ultimately hear to the setting that works perfectly for you.
10.Video Playback
Songbird not only plays music, it plays video, too. When you import video files, Songbird automatically puts them in the video node of your library. Video formats currently supported are mov, m4v, mp4, ogv and wmv. You will need additional codecs to be able to play avi and mkv.
Songbird is capable of so much more as this list is hardly complete. This list just gives an overview of what’s available on Songbird these days. You surely have some of your own favorites that perhaps, you feel should have gone into this list. Tell us about them!
About Aurora Freegard
