Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.
Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.
Songbird 0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features:
Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.
Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.
Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection.