What is Songbird?
Songbird is an open-source, cross-platform music player and media library application originally created by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a company started by former Mozilla developers. It was first released in 2006.
Some key features of Songbird include:
- Support for playing local music files in formats like MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, etc.
- Streaming of internet radio stations
- Intuitive and customizable interface with support for skins and add-ons
- Music library management with metadata extraction, tagging and auto-playlists
- Synchronization of music libraries across devices
- Online music store integration
- Web browser functionality built directly into the application
While development of Songbird stalled for several years, the platform was acquired and open-sourced in 2015 by Pioneers of the Inevitable co-founder Ellen Shapiro. This allowed the devoted Songbird user community to contribute updates and new features.
Some of the downsides of Songbird are that sync functionality is still imperfect, the online services are mostly defunct, and there are occasional stability issues. However, it remains popular among power users for its robust feature set and ability to heavily customize the user experience.
Winamp, Windows Media Player, MusicBee, MediaMonkey, Poweramp, AIMP, foobar2000, Rhythmbox, Audacious, Clementine, Quod Libet, DeaDBeeF are some alternatives to Songbird.