Songbird 1.1 Is Now Available.
In the latest update the team at Songbird have added one-click album artwork retrieval, bug fixes and a long list of performance enhancements (most notably a reduction in memory & CPU usage).
One of the things I’m excited about is the new Songbird protocol handler (songbird://) which allows Songbird to be accessed from a URL. For example, click this URL in Firefox and it opens Last.fm in the Songbird browser:
songbird:open?url=http%3A%2F%2Flast.fm
This helps blurs the line between finding music on the web and playing music in a music library.
Songbird Bookmarklet
One example of the protocol at work is this bookmarklet by Trent on Lifehacker. Simply bookmark this link below. Then when you come across downloadable music on the web, click the bookmarklet and the files are ready for download in Songbird:
javascript:document.location=”songbird:open?url=”+escape(document.location);
I’d like it if Songbird offered this as a default during installation – like delicious does. It’d be a lot easier for newbies who might be intimidated with anything that is related to javascript code.
As digital audio files continue to flow freely on the Internet, music itself mimics certain inherent characteristics of the web best understood through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (D&G) rhizome metaphor. In A Thousand Plateaus, D&G introduce the concept of a “rhizome” to describe a representative model that extends in all directions and has multiple entryways; since then it has most commonly been used as a metaphor to represent the Internet. Understanding digital music as rhizomatic is important because it interprets the transformations of the digital music culture as a natural progression towards rhizomatic qualities – and provides us with an insight into what might be the future of “the music industry”.
