Songbird is a new music application that allows you to 'play' the web like a playlist. It's like iTunes with a web browser built-in. Sort of. The idea is that within Songbird, you can browse the web, and pages that contain links to audio files (like say an MP3 blog), populate a playlist that you can then listen to while you surf. It's format independent as well, so it will play anything. You can then save these playlists, set them up for auto-downloading, edit them, etc.

It all sounds pretty cool, and is a great idea. But I can't help but get the feeling that Songbird as a full fledged web-browser is a bit of overkill. Sure, I'd love the ability to browse my daily MP3 blog route listening to their posts as I read, but I'm not sure I want to fire up a specialized application to do it.

Songbird touts the use of XUL, a kind of mark-up language (like HTML) that is intended for designing user-interfaces. It's supported by Gecko based browsers like Firefox, and so Songbird is essentially a skinned Firefox with a media player built-in.

Sure, that's a great idea, but is it necessary? Seems to me that Songbird would be far more usable as a plugin to Firefox, a kind of invisible toolbar that played my web pages that I'm browsing with Firefox anyway. I just can't see myself (or even a wide variety of people) firing up a specialized browser just to listen to streamed music on the web.

I think Songbird is a fantastic application, and it's still very early in development and so has time to grow and evolve, but I think this might be a case of 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should.'

Songbird doesn't need to be a full-fledged web-browser, or even a full-fledged media app. It just needs to be a useful widget that plays music while you surf.

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Tags: songbird|mp3|itunes|firefox|xul