After about 2 years of development, we can finally embrace the first major release of Songbird. It’s an open-source media player using the Mozilla Application Framework that has the capability to surf the web and is able to play, queue or subscribe to embedded media from a web page. Video support isn’t all that super, yet!

There is support of portable media devices, although the support of iPod devices is limited. As a (might-be-maybe-we-will-see) future owner of an iPhone, I would love to see Songbird supporting it. I do not like iTunes at all.

And of course… it’s cross platform! So your Mac, Linux box or Windows PC will happy to run it for you.

• Official announcement on Songbird Blog.
• Mozilla Links has a nice overview of the release here.

UPDATE: After writing this post I searched around a little and came upon this page: 10 Alternatives to iTunes for managing your iPod. Enjoy :o)