If you listen to a lot of music on the computer, listen up. I’ve tried a ton of music player apps over the years, and while my most recent favorite to date is Amarok, I can’t run it (without a lot of work in fink) on the Mac yet. I’ve been using iTunes long enough to understand it’s strange non-intuitive idiosyncrasies to the point that I actually enjoy using it. But whenever a comparable open source project comes along (especially if it uses Mozilla code) I have to check it out asap. Songbird is a ‘mash-up‘ of a browser and a music player. Whether it will get popular or not remains to be seen, but it does change the way you experience new music.

I’ve written about another good Mozilla mash-up called Flock in the past and it’s integration to the online photo sharing site Flickr, as well as it’s slick integration to Del.icio.us. This is a different animal entirely.

Songbird is brand new, beta test software - but it’s useable. If you’re not comfortable installing and using software that hasn’t even reached version 0.3 yet, you may want to wait a while - but for the bleeding edge folks, it’s definitely worth a try.

Songbird looks eerily like iTunes, but there is no link to Apple’s music store, and it won’t import DRM protected tunes that such sites pimp. Otherwise, you can import the songs from your iTunes library into Songbird, and play them pretty much as you would in that player with the exception of the Party Shuffle and active search functions which I like in iTunes, but Songbird makes it easy to find new music posted out on regular old webpages (mostly on blogs calling themselves MP3blogs) through the Web Library search function.

The fact that Songbird looks and acts like a music player means you can play and manipulate the tunes using player controls while you read what usually amounts to a short text liner note for the song(s) presented in a browser window. Yes, you could visit these sites with a regular browser, but you wouldn’t be interacting with the music the same way as you do when you use a player. In a browser, usually an mp3 link will open in a new page/tab, while in songbird it is a more ‘integrated’. The library (xml just like iTunes) is dynamically updated with tunes that exist out on the web on those websites, and as far as I know you aren’t ‘downloading’ them, I don’t know what happens to these links in the database when the files become unavailable on that site. Do they just disappear? Do they remain as broken links like in iTunes when you remove a song from the physical folder it resides in?

Obviously some more beta testing is in order!

I’m sure it won’t be long before the record companies get wind of Songbird. Is this just another way for those evil music sharing fiends to get around paying for music? Once the record companies have scared everyone out of P2P (peer to peer) file sharing networks, or flooded those networks with Viagra ads and viruses (yes, we all know the P2P networks were purposely poisoned by the record companies and publishers), the slippery audio thieves find another haven, right out in the open on little blogs here and there! It will be interesting to see how the record companies can argue with a blogger who streams a song out on his website which can’t be downloaded, but only listened to - hmmm, just like a radio station? Add that to the complication that bloggers are paying for their site bandwidth and will not offer tons of files, you end up with a zillion bloggers all over the world instead of 5 kids running a P2P file share server. Even given the fact that we know the record company lawyers will not fear dragging a 12 year old into court, how will they be able to afford bringing a million bloggers all over the world to court? And for sharing at most, what 3 songs a month? Pay your 0.25 cent fine, sir. I guess the best advice is to buy music legally, and only buy from independent musicians and only when there is no DRM crap involved. Buy from Magnatune where the artists actually get some of the money too.