Songbird

Songbird is a very good media player that looks like the Apple QuickTime player. Its interface is quite sleek for a freeware.

After the player is installed, you need to select the folders to be scanned for media files. The media library is the main window of the program. Searching for files and browsing the library is very fast, unlike in Windows Media Player, where it is hard to know whether a particular file is included in the library or not. The program scans and adds all the files in one single process. The items found will be grouped according to the genre, artist, and album. It can find damaged/broken tracks and duplicated ones. It includes a metadata editor, and the album art can be downloaded from the Internet.

It includes a lot of online features, the music store is one of them, and many radio stations are available too. YouTube cannot be viewed from its inbuilt browser, because of some errors happening.

The “Add-ons” tab lists the websites where we can get free add-ons (I liked the one called “The Exorcist”). But don’t install many of them as it will make the program very slow.

Anyway, the program is slow at start and, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to support the Windows Aero interface.

Different feathers for Songbird, or “skins” are also available for free. Skins identical to the aero theme can be installed.

As a whole, this is very good piece of software.