One of the coolest things about the internet is finding new, fun programs to play around with. Today’s program is called Songbird. A music player application, who’s deliberately competing with iTunes. It’s cross-platform (which means, Windows, Mac, and Linux users are all welcome), and probably the most interesting part, is it’s developed from the same code base as Firefox and Thunderbird, Mozilla’s flagship open source applications.

Don’t be startled by my funky interface. This is just one of the skins (or “feathers” as they’re known in Songbird) that I chose to apply. I like black, can you tell. Looks better on my Linux machine, though.

There’s a bunch of fun stuff just on this main page. The left-hand pane is actually quite similar to the iTunes playlist section. In fact, the playlists you see were imported directly from iTunes, as was my whole library on this machine. Yes, that’s right. Installing this app does not inherently mean re-ripping everything. Songbird aims for universal compatability.

But what about all those other panes? Well, that’s one of the more fun parts of Songbird. It’s extensibility.

Veteran users of Firefox will notice, at this point, just how similar Songbird is to Firefox. Songbird supports third-party add-ons. Such as the LyricMaster plugin you see on the right side of the screenshot above which will retrieve lyrics for you while online and offer to save them locally so you can still access them offline (you can also choose automatic save).

Or the mashTape plugin (one of Songbird’s recommended plugins when you install it), that gathers Artist Info, News, Photos, and Videos from online (I was not aware Brad Sucks even has any videos on YouTube).

Also, the Concerts plugin which, once set up, will gather information on which artists are going to be in your area and when.

But it gets better.

Songbird has, not surprisingly given it’s roots, an embedded tabbed web browser.

Given all this fun new information, it might be nice to have a way to book those tickets or watch that video without having to jump to another program. Well, Songbird can do it. It’s not really so innovative. The iTunes store is really just another website that’s specialized to run in a specific program. All Songbird did was give the program an address bar.

Though I wouldn’t recommend it for casual browsing. I tried to check Facebook with it and I did succeed, but Facebook gave me a giant, ugly message saying that I needed to upgrade to the newest version of Firefox.

Yeah, shows what you know, Facebook.

All that being said, Songbird 1.0 has just been released. Prior to this, a release candidate had come out and got a pretty poor review on Lifehacker for all it’s bugs, though they say it’s looking a lot cleaner with this newest version.

I’ve been using it for roughly a week. I can say it definitely needs work. For one, it can’t natively burn CDs (or at least, I haven’t found that feature). I’d also like more keyboard shortcut support. But if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and give it a shot.

No matter what, though, this should be at least somewhat interesting over the next several months, to see just how this goes.