The Talking Head

Being a big fan of open source projects I find myself constantly looking for alternatives to the closed source projects that so many of us use on a daily basis. One repository that I check often is at Open Source as Alternative. This is a nice place to browse when you have a few spare moments.

A project that I found about six months ago that I have been using religiously since then is Songbird. Up until this point I have been a user of Musicmatch, but my relationship with it has always been a love/hate with the emphasis on hate because it is an absolute resource hog and it doesn't relinquish those precious resources when I am finished using it. The reason I loved it was for the great way it handled my library. The sorting, tagging, and browsing all just worked.

Enough about the old and onto discussing the new. Songbird is based on the Mozilla runtime environment XULrunner and like the other apps using this, it is light and fast. The essence of songbird is threefold. It is a desktop jukebox, web browser, and online content player all in one. While still in its infancy, Songbird can be used by the forgiving as a daily media player. I have been installing the nightly builds for a number of months now, but can always revert back to their latest stable build if I run into something that just isn't cutting it. This will be an application that has a very bright future as it moves closer to its 1.0 release.