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Download Songbird 1.0.0 RC1

Songbird is a free software media player and web browser developed as open source by a group known as Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for both Winamp[1] and the Yahoo! Music Engine), with a stated mission “to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web.”[2]

Songbird employs Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, and is thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. On the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Songbird utilizes the VideoLAN Client for media playback. For Linux & Solaris, Songbird uses the GStreamer media framework instead of VideoLAN. The Qtrax client is based on Songbird.

Songbird Features

• * Cross-platform compatibility with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X (x86) and Linux (x86, x86_64)
• * Ability to play multiple audio formats, such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and WMA
• * Ability to play Apple FairPlay-encoded audio on Windows and Mac platforms via hooks into QuickTime (authorization takes place in iTunes)
• * Ability to play Windows Media DRM audio on Windows platforms
• * A skinnable interface, via feathers
• * Media files stored on pages viewed in the browser show up as playable files in Songbird
• * Built-in RSS subscription and MP3 file download
• * Ability to subscribe to MP3 blogs as playlists
• * User-created bookmarks
• * Ability to build custom mixes
• * Ability to scan the user’s computer for all audio files and add them to a local library
• * A configurable and collapsible graphical user interface similar to iTunes, and mini-player mode
• * Keyboard shortcuts and media keyboard support
• * Automatic updates
• * eMusic integration using the eMusic Integration plugin
• * Insound.com and HypeMachine integration
• * Microsoft MTP compatible device support
• * Ability to edit metadata tags and save back to file
• * Gstreamer enabling in Windows and Mac for FLAC Playback

New Features in Songbird Beta

• Device Support
  Songbird’s device support is limited. The Device Support wiki has additional details about what’s supported. Apple iPhones, iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune devices are not yet supported.
• Metadata Management
  Songbird supports reading from and writing metadata to many music file formats. We still need to support the ability to fetch additional metadata from popular lookup services.
• Album Artwork
  Display the currently playing track’s album art and write new artwork back to the file. We still need to support album art fetching.
• Subscriptions
  Subscribe to music blogs and download music directly to your library. We’re working on ways to improve this feature.
• Performance and Stability
  Improving the performance and stability of Songbird is an ongoing focus. Each release we set aside dedicated cycles to ensure we’re making progress.
• Album Artwork
  Display the currently playing track’s album art and write new artwork back to the file. We still need to support album art fetching.
• Improved Playback
  GStreamer will soon be the default media core on all platforms. This will improve existing playback features and enable additional functionality, such as gapless playback.

Download Songbird 1.0.0 RC1