Something off the topic of real estate, I have been trying the new 1.0 release of Songbird. If you have not heard of Songbird it is “an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development.”  Besides being open source, it is also cross platform, meaning you can run it on Windows, Linux, or Mac. Running only Linux here for years now, this is very important to me.

After getting Songbird installed. I installed a couple of plugins, the most important to me is SHOUTcast Radio and less important but fun to have is the Lyricmaster plugin. Both plugins worked well seperatly, however I found that the Shoutcast plugin did not correctly update the Artist and Album information in songbird which meant Lyricmaster could not display the song’s lyrics.

I listen to shoutcast radio about 99% of the time I have music playing, which  really made the lyricsmaster plugin useless for me. However, I did some searching and found that in the SHOUTcast plugin’s SVN repository they had fixed this behavior. So I pulled the changelog and diffs down and modified the last stable release to include that feature.

Now that I had lyrics pulling in, I found one other issue which was that SHOUTcast was not showing me radio stations that used the AAC codec. Of course it happens that one of my favorit stations, Bassendean Town Radio, uses AAC. Not to fear a quick review of the directory.js file from the SHOUTcast plugin, and I found where the developers were removing AAC streams, in case users did not have AAC playback support.

Now with my favourite radio station playing, and lyrics pulling in I install the YABS theme, which is called a feather in songbird. Below is what songbird now looks like when running..

Songbird Screenshot

Besides the two issues I had with the SHOUTcast addon, that I am sure will be fixed in the next release, I have had no other problems so far with Soungbird. For a 1.0 release, this product seems stable and well built. If anyone else likes listening to music why they work, I suggest giving songbird a try. Also, if anyone wants a copy of the changes I made to teh SHOUTcast plugin, just let me know and I am happy to post them.