Given that the internet now has the power to propel bands and artists like the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen from nowhere to super-stardom, keeping up with what’s playing on the global cyber-jukebox is all important, but also massively time-consuming thanks to its mind-boggling vastness.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Thanks to a neat little cross-platform, open-source application called Songbird, surfing the web for interesting new music is about to get a whole lot easier.
Songbird flies
Songbird is part media player, part browser, and its speciality is discovering downloadable music from the hordes of MP3 blogs on the internet. It works using a number of musically-weighted search engines and a browser built on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform.
So, if you really have a burning desire to find out more about, say, the dubstep, speedcore or Miami booty bass genres, Songbird will be able to help you find blogs and pages about them.
Better still, once you’ve found your blog or page, Songbird will display all the MP3s hosted on the page in a separate box, allowing you to sample or download them with a single click.
Open-source means that Songbird, like Firefox, supports add-on applications. These can range from a simple iTunes library importer to something that’ll display the Wiki entry for whichever band you’re listening too.
Songbird is available for Mac, Windows and Linux users from the Songbird homepage. Be warned that the application is still in its beta phase though, so there are some bugs.
