Born On The Web

Well the future lays in the browser, everybody knows that. And that is the exact reason that from today on, I’ll change my standard music player on my computer. I’ve been long with Winamp. It is fast, responsive and has an incredibly cool classic skin, which I’m sure going to miss. But times change, just as my listening behavior has changed. I find myself listening less to my personal music library and more to last.fm radio, shoutcast stations or StuBru via streaming.

So since a few months I’ve been playing with Songbird, the music player based on Mozilla Firefox, which actually makes it a browser that can play music. And I have to say the more I use it, the more I really like the flexibility and openness open source alternatives bring. Just like Firefox their is an add-on ability. Where I recently found some cool powerfull add-ons.

But the real power of Songbird is in the way how it can handle online music. It plays MP3’s as good from a website as it can play them from your hard-drive. Songbird is native web player. This allows you to just use the internal Skreemr MP3 search engine and start listening to your favorite band. Every time songbird finds a link to an audio file on a webpage it will automatically put it into a playlist. Which means you can immediately start listening, without downloading.

And the future of Songbird lays in integration with webpages. If you take a look at the functionalities of their webpage API. You’ll see the direction they are going. Via Songbird, you will be able to play music from webpages but also the other way around. Webpages can get to know what you’re playing. And for example give bring you other related music. (There’s even a business model in that one)

Songbird, the music player for the net natives. Bright future ahead…