If you're sick of the big memory footprint and CPU utilisation of iTunes or Windows Media Player, a new media player from the people who made Firefox is a promising new option.
I still remember the first time I loaded an MP3 onto my Pentium II “beast-in-its-day” PC and was amazed at how I could store music without the whopping file size of wave files.
Since then, playing audio tracks on computers has come a long way and we’ve seen a plethora of audio players come and go. The two big players in the audio player realm at the moment have to be Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.
But a lot of people, including me, tend to steer away from these giants and go for the lighterweight underdogs instead like Winamp and VLC Media Player. These two community-supported, freeware options have been around for a while now and have been tried and tested.
There is, however, a newbie on the block that is a combination of an iTunes-like interface, with snappier responsiveness and a community development effort beind it.
Songbird is open-source, cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) and based on Mozilla’s XUL (XML-based user interface language). At first glance, it looks like iTunes with a black glass skin, but poking a little deeper at it reveals a slick and powerful media player that feels a lot like Firefox (check out the Preferences panel, look familiar?) and includes some of its best features.
Besides being able to surf the web from inside the media player, it can detect embedded playlists on web pages that it can then play, save or automatically download them each day.
Another exciting feature is its support for cross-platform extensions just like Firefox and Thunderbird, meaning users can extend its functionality and customize the application to fit their personal needs.
Although only in its early stages (the copy we downloaded crashed a few times), we expect a lot from this player as the team behind it have been responsible for such successes as Winamp, Yahoo! Music Engine and Muse.Net.
If you’ve got some other recommendations on freeware audio players that are worth sitting up and taking notice of, or would like to post your thoughts on Songbird, we’d love to hear them below.