OK Computer

For the longest time, I just used WinAmp to play my music. In fact, I used WinAmp 2.x long after the 3 and 5 series came out. When I started run­ning Linux on the lap­top, I fell in love with Amarok. It was fast, pow­er­ful, and full of cool new fea­tures. I switched to musikCube back on the desk­top, which was the clos­est thing to Amarok I could get on Win­dows. But now that hasn’t been updated in about two years.

I just started using Song­bird, though, and it is amaz­ing. It’s built around the same ideal as Mozilla Fire­fox… free and open-​source, and very exten­si­ble. The inter­face is sim­i­lar to Amarok/​musikCube/​iTunes, but it can be changed with themes called “feath­ers.” The main win­dow is tabbed, and you can switch between your library view, a web view to check out the Song­bird site or var­i­ous music blogs, or your file direc­to­ries (with a plug-​in). There are plug-​ins that tightly inte­grate Song­bird with last​.fm, allow­ing you to scrob­ble tracks as you play them, and find rec­om­men­da­tions for other songs and artists based on your playlist and scrob­bles. You can quickly get artist and song info, includ­ing links to buy tracks and albums, or check out their home­page, MySpace, etc. There’s also plug-​ins to auto­mat­i­cally get the lyrics of the song you’re play­ing and high­light the words as the song plays so you can sing along. Oh, and it has iPod sup­port for you Apple-​heads. (Is that the right term?)

Oh, and I’ve been back in 8-​bit music mode lately, so here are some cool links for you to check out:
First, a guy who remade Radio­head songs in 8-​bit.
Next, an album of Christ­mas songs mashed up with theme songs from NES games.
And finally, two great albums of 8-​bit Christ­mas minus the mash-​ups.

Tags: Computer, Games, Music