At Joe’sBigToe.co.uk we deal with music. We deal with beats and rhythms, melod­ies and har­mon­ies, bass and treble. And that’s a great start. We give you our sug­ges­tions, recom­mend­a­tions, and thoughts on what you should listen to and why. But in the past, we’ve gone as far as sug­gest­ing where to get your music from (see the edit­or­ial on eMusic). In the future, we might try and tell you when to listen to music, but now, I want to talk to you about how you listen to music. Nowadays, most people don’t have a record player sit­ting in their front room, any more than they have a betamax player, or per­haps even a VHS player. In fact, the major­ity of music listen­ers nowadays prob­ably have never dropped a needle on a 12″. Music listen­ers of today and the future will listen to digital music. They will immerse them­selves in iPods and iTunes and iSongs and iAlbums.

Which is fine. Except for the fact that iTunes is inex­tric­ably linked to the iTunes store. Which is in turn exclus­ively linked to an iPod. Now, don’t get me wrong, Apple stuff looks nice. I mean, it’s beau­ti­fully designed, it pretty much smells of new car, and feels like vel­vet. But therein lies the rub — it’s so nice, there’s no incent­ive to keep hunt­ing for new stuff. Which is a bit like buy­ing a Beach Boys album, decid­ing it’s fant­astic, and then never listen­ing to any­thing apart from the Beach Boys. So, where’s the way out? How do we avoid the i-hole? I think I may just have found the answer.

Another com­pany has in the past tried to lock us into it’s sys­tems, and failed. Microsoft tried very hard, and have done a pretty decent job of con­vin­cing com­puter users that Word is the best way to write let­ters, Excel is the best way to man­age spread­sheets, and Out­look is the best way to man­age your e-mail. They were a long way towards con­vin­cing people that Inter­net Explorer was the best way to use the Inter­net too. But then came Fire­fox. Firefox’s cur­rent mar­ket share is 42.6%, and Inter­net Explorer’s is 51.4%. And it’s from Firefox’s par­ent com­pany, Moz­illa, that the answer I was talk­ing about earlier issues forth. That answer, is Songbird.

Song­bird is a revolu­tion­ary piece of soft­ware. It’s a music player — but it’s also a web browser. The music player part is very sim­ilar to iTunes, works in much the same way, and is gen­er­ally rel­at­ively nice. Sound, and easy to get used to, if you’ve ever used a media player before. But where this player really comes into its own is in the web browser. Song­bird comes with sev­eral book­marks already in place for explor­ing sites like The Hype Machine and InSound, and when you decide to ven­ture out, Song­bird acts very sim­il­arly to a nor­mal web browser. So why’s this so great then? The answer lies in how it deals with online media. As soon as Song­bird spots an MP3 on a webpage, a little box pops up at the bot­tom of the browser, which acts as a playl­ist. You can use this playl­ist to play music from the page you’re on — but you can also down­load the music. You can add it dir­ectly to your lib­rary, and then you have a local copy. Web­sites can also inter­act with Song­bird in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent ways — for example, this web­site has recently given Song­bird users the oppor­tun­ity to search for reviews of the artist that they are cur­rently listen­ing to.

If you’re still not con­vinced, then think about this — it will still work with your iPod, and the latest release (0.7 RC3) looks almost exactly like iTunes. The cur­rent stable ver­sion is 0.6.1, but the advant­ages you can get from upgrad­ing to the Release Can­did­ate are huge.

So, take my advice — give it a go. It won’t cost you a penny.

Get Song­bird 0.6.1

Or get the latest Song­bird, 0.7 RC3