[ale] OT: Songbird rocks!

[Paul Cartwright]

On Wed December 3 2008, Scott Castaline wrote:
> I had ripped all of my CD's, according to Rhythmbox, my CD library is
> 73.3 GB and would take 11 days, 10 hours and 22 minutes of non-stop play
> time. Now I plan to add in my Vinyl collection which is at least 10
> times my CD collection. Unfortunately, my old Sony turntable died, it
> does not maintain it's speed, and I had just put in a new cartridge and
> stylus. :^(

just read this from an RSS feed:

http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1445
Yesterday I installed the new 1.0.0 release of Songbird. Songbird is an iTunes 
like Open Source media player that holds some stunning promise. They have 
used Mozilla technologies and GStreamer to build a cross-platform media 
player. I know some of the guys who work on Songbird and wanted to give it a 
try: I had last used an early snapshot. While I don’t want to turn this into 
a review (if you folks want a review, let me know and I will write one up), 
it ships with some interesting features that build on some of the concepts 
seen in Banshee. Oh, and Amarok folks, I know your media player has probably 
been doing all of this for years, so hold fire. :) 
In Songbird, for the artist of the song I am currently listening to, Songbird 
will go and look up data from a number of resources and bring it together. It 
grabs a summary blurb, discography, members, tags and links of the artist 
from Last.fm, a photo slideshow from Flickr, videos from YouTube, and News 
from Google News. Again, I could find this information separately without 
ever installing Songbird, but Songbird not only aggregated this content, but 
it linked it to an opportunity of curiosity (what I am listening to). I might 
never typically go and look for more details about Hammerfall, but when I am 
listening to it, it often triggers my interest. Songbird satisfies that 
curiosity before I even know I have it.
Another great feature of Songbird that builds on active learning is that it 
uses Songkick to look up all of the artists in my playlist to see if there 
are concerts and shows in my area. With this feature I now have a list of all 
the up and coming shows for the artists I like (including all those obscure 
metal bands). This provides me with direct access to the local community and 
opportunities. That is one stunningly helpful and outrageously cool feature. 
My media player is stopping being a place to merely consume music, and 
instead becoming a place to aggregate everything these is about the music I 
listen to and the artists that make it


-- 
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800
Registered Ubuntu User #12459