I wrote about my MP3 player of choice before. Today I tried a new player in the field. Its called Songbird and is only available in a 0.2 Developer Preview version, but this already works very nice. To get it running install a few debian packages¹⁾, then download the binary from their site and ignore the message that it can't connect to the gstreamer backemd. At least for me it worked non the less.

So what's so special about this player? Its written in XUL and embeds Firefox's browser engine. So it's a webbrowser with a builtin mediaplayer (or the other way round). Usually I'm no fan of bloated programs, but songbird seems to be different - it really makes sense. It's the ideal tool to browser audio blogs or podcast sites. It is really hard to describe, so you really should have a look at the screencast they provide.

I don't know if this will replace my usual audio player. It seems not to be the right tool to get random background noise (which is how I use my music collection usually). It's more a tool for real audiophiles who want to consciously listen to music and discover new tunes.

Similar posts:

• Linux MP3 Music Library Managers
• New MP3 Player
• Moved from Debian to Arch Linux