"I'm Like a (Song)bird"'

I recently raved about how Songbird is slowly becoming my music player of choice on Windows, and with the upcoming version 1.1 release, some much-appreciated features will be available that will bring it very close to being feature-complete for me. I won't reiterate my previous article here, that's for your reading, but I will cover the new features and why I feel they are awesome for this 1.1 release.

Folder Watch: One of Winamp's best features is roughly called "folder watch" - the ability for the program to "watch" a folder for new or missing files and automatically add them to the main music library. I consider this feature paramount to any music application. Why can't I store all my music in the folder structure of my choosing and have that music available in my program without tedious drag-and-dropping? iTunes doesn't believe in this: tracks must be added manually once you have them stored where you want them. Bad, iTunes, bad. Songbird mimics Winamp's folder watch feature, and this will be awesome.

Album Art: I have an iPod touch... and being all screen, I find that a lot of the screen ends up being wasted when I'm just listening to music. Case in point: album art is displayed by default when a song is played, but better than 90% of my music collection does not feature album information, let along album art to go with it. Songbird 1.1 ups the ante here a bit by providing automatic album art recovery from the internet source of your choice. It goes one better by allowing Last.fm to be one of those sources, which is a big deal to me for one reason... without proper album names in all of my music, I cannot get the proper album art, but Last.fm also features a band picture/profile for every artist, regardless of album. Thus, in the event that a song does not have album information associate with it, Songbird will simply pull this default photo from Last.fm, meaning that one way or another, all of my music will be tagged with art... simply awesome.

There are still a few features that are keeping Songbird from completely replacing Winamp, but they are still in the pipeline, and should be implemented fully this year:

CD Ripping: Although I rarely buy CDs anymore, I still do have the need to rip music on occasion, so I'm glad this is coming.

Full iPod Support: While iTunes will always be my main app for syncing purposes, it would be nice to get around Apple's sometimes restrictive rules on directional syncing and take music off my iPod, something Songbird will eventually get around to. Also, while most iPod models are supported for syncing now, my iPod touch is not one of them. It would also be nice to selectively sync with music I have at work as well.

Well the 1.1 release of Songbird is in beta right now, so hopefully within the next week or two it will be released as a stable product, and I can't wait to update all of my album art finally.

B3 out.