Songbird is a cross-platform, Mozilla-based music player with high ambitions. The app is still undergoing heavy development, but it has come a long way since we looked at the 0.1 release in 2006. Songbird today can sing a pretty sweet tune, but to push its way into the big leagues, it needs to get over its own interface.

I'll start with a quote from the official Songbird homepage, which goes like 'Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players'. Although not (yet) as popular in the audio players world as Firefox is in the one of web browsers, Songbird looks and offers an interface which integrates both powerful browsing features and music collection management.

Songbird Music Player was among the most beloved Open Source project and it still is for many, except for Linux users. Songbird is still open source, but developers behind Songbird have decided to discontinue support for Linux and the concentrate on Mac and Windows versions of Songbird.

Not long ago I reviewed Songbird 0.7.0, and in the meantime version 1.0.0 was released. What are the new features Songbird comes with and what improvements over the previous releases features 1.0? Well, to begin with, I was extremely impressed in a pleasant way with this Songbird release, so let me tell you why.

The first stable version of Songbird has been unleashed... One of the very first things to do after installing Songbird is to get and test-drive some of the available extensions. At the moment, there are probably hundreds of add-ons, so as a guide to new Songbird users, let me share to you a few of my favorites...

I’ve spent the past two days down in Mountain View. Yesterday I spent some time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit meeting with the great guys from the Ubuntu Mozilla-team to see about integrating Songbird into Ubuntu (ideally Jaunty, but we’ll see).

I had reviewed Songbird close to two years back , and at that time Songbird was impressive but was bug ridden, lacked important features and certain degree of polishing which was expected from an application intended to be used on Desktops.

"The Songbird open-source media player that is built using Firefox technology and XUL Runner is now available in a early beta release..."

This news, posted to the official SongBird blog last Friday, came as a shocking slap in the face to someone who only recently freed his music library from the clutches of iTunes. Songbird was the logical choice to prepare for my eventual immersion in Linux, and now Songbird’s future on that OS is no more.