Tuesday 14 April 2009

Back on the Linux bandwagon

Come on... OS X mobile is based on OS X and that's got Unix roots same as Linux! Too tenuous? OK then back to more Linux related stuff.

First up is the media player which may allow me to ditch Vista! Songbird has been developed by the Mozilla Foundation and is set to do for the same thing for music players that firefox did for browsers.
No points for guessing where the inspiration for the GUI came from

The software looks uncannily like iTunes and has full support for importing iTunes libraries. The Linux version didn't recognise my iTunes library from my Vista hard drive but does recognise and play all the songs from that location :-)

Obviously there isn't any support for encrypted AAC files but with iTunes going DRM free this isn't a problem anymore.

One thing that firefox is famous for is addons and songbird is no exception. Indeed the coverflow style interface in the screenshot above is an addon named media flow. One of the most useful addons from my point of view enables intergration with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

My second favorite addon is Last.fm. Media players for Linux often have Last.fm support for "scrobbling" which is the process by which people on Last.fm can see what sort of music you are listening to. Very few media players on Linux have support for streaming Last.fm which is really wierd as the API is available for developers to use. Songbird is one player which does allow full streaming of Last.fm and even allows loving, banning and favoriting of tracks!


1 comment:

urra901109 said...

i'm using songbird too.. nice interface isn't it? media player 11 with glass theme are just resource hungry.