My favorite birdie just got a new pair of feathers! Songbird, the Internet's premier audio and web mashup, just turned another major milestone with their 0.6 release. I've been following this project closely since its inception and the 0.1 days ever since I saw a post on a random tech site about the concept. The idea is really very simple, and fucking cool as hell in practice. Take a bunch of seasoned developers, come up with an open sourced version of iTunes, throw in Mozilla's Firefox engine, and give it the ability to play anything anywhere! If that doesn't sound cool, maybe DRM is more your speed.

Since it's inception, Songbird has seen a huge amount of changes both on and behind the surface, regardless, it has done nothing but become increasingly better as time goes on. Running on Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP/Vista, with full MTP and Ipod support, this little birdie is without a doubt going on to a very promising future. Oh and did I mention it is fully extendable and comes with a ton of user community add-ons? To say it is an iTunes killer is only just the start.

Take these concepts for example: While listening to your favorite album, lyrics, concert dates, and band pictures are all shown to you with the click off a button. Not enough? Open up a Songbird browser window and travel over to last.fm for some new music. Songbird will not only scrobble whatever you want it to with last.fm, but you can connect it to any number of other music sites in order to search a whole genre with one click. Still not enough? Songbird will hook directly into shoutcast.com and stream any Internet radio stations you feel like listening to. Oh and did I mention it plays just about every audio format and allows direct meta-tag editing? Songbird is quickly becoming the best choice for audiophiles and is definitely my favorite music app on all three platforms.

If you're interested, go try out the latest release and let me know what you think. I'm currently talking with the developers and attempting to get Songbird added to Fedora, but in the near future I'll have Fedora 8 and 9 RPM's available for Songbird 0.6, so check back soon.

Unlike Songbird, Firefox 3 need much less of an introduction. Released today, the Mozilla team has put together one hell of a package. This release aims at making the Fox extremely fast and efficient, while integrating a bunch of new features, such as the Awesome Bar (I'll let you figure it out for yourself). So far my impressions of it have been very good! It is very stable, very fast, less of a memory hog compared to older versions, and has had an overhaul of the add-on section. I definitely suggest anyone already running Firefox upgrade, and those that use IE should switch immediatley (how does anyone use that garbage as a browser anyways?)

Besides the obvious reasons, Mozilla is also hoping you download Firefox 3 today in order to help set a world record for the most downloaded software in twenty-four hours. Soon after launch, the servers were actually taken down because of the enourmous interest in the new version, but everything was restored quickly and the race was on! Check out the current progress over here. Thanks to the mozdev.org icon packs for this very cool version of the Firefox logo. I wish they were going to this!