Songbird beta released

Mozilla Songbird 0.7 Previously in alpha testing with the earlier versions, with version 0.7, the Mozilla-based Songbird open source media player transitions into the beta testing phase. Highlight of the beta version 0.7 is the newly restructured, simpler and more intuitive user interface. iTunes users are likely to be quite familiar with the new look and feel which is now even closer to Apple's player and shop software, apart that is from the control elements, which are located at the bottom instead of the top of the window.

Another new feature is the support for the Last.fm music community with the addition of scrobbling. Scrobbling is the term used to describe getting the media player to automatically tell Last.fm what tracks you are listening to. Last.fm allows users to share their listening habits and connect with like-minded music lovers all over the world.

Songbird now supports "smart playlists", playlists which are generated dynamically by a set of filter rules.

Other functions are still in need of a little work as expected in a beta. While Songbird can displays cover artwork, it can't download missing images yet. The same applies to missing meta-data for songs. Developers plan to improve the device support for mobile players, currently limited to iPods, and devices that support MTP. iPhones and iPod Touches are not currently supported. They also plan to use the GStreamer multimedia framework on all platforms.

Songbird uses the same extension mechanism as Firefox/Thunderbird, making it relatively easy to add extensions to the program. The player is available for download and runs on Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.

(djwm)