Watch out proprietary software providers.  Open source has an audio player that has the potential of doing what Firefox did for web browsers and people’s perception of open source.  The program I am talking about is Songbird and it rocks!  I must admit since switching completely over to an open source OS (Ubuntu) almost two years ago now I have always missed iTunes.  I love coverflow in iTunes but with Songbird 1.0 comes the ability to add a ton of new plugins very easily and one of them is “Media Flow” which feels exactly like coverflow.  If I haven’t said it a million times before, the beauty of open source as we all know is that it is “open” so developers can build modules on top of a stable code base.  So by simply clicking the “Songbird Add-ons” link in the left hand navigation you are taken to a add-ons page with one click installation. If you want to learn more you can check out the Songbird blog.  I took the above screenshot this morning so you can see what it looks like in more detail.  For those of you who aren’t ready to use an open source OS yet it is also available for Windows and Mac.  Support open source!

Add-ons I have installed so far:

• LyricsMaster
  • Displays the lyrics a song has embedded through metadata.
  • Fetch the lyrics if the song contains no lyric metadata.
  • Give the user and option to search the web for lyrics if no appropriate lyrics are found.
  • Allow the user to edit the lyrics a song contains.
  • Fetch the lyrics for one or more songs at a time.
  • Displays an icon next to the track in the library if the track has lyrics.
  • A help dialog from within Songbird.
• MediaFlow
  • MediaFlow adds a new media view for your library and playlists you can access from the View>Media Views>MediaFlow menu.
• iPod Device Support
  • Play your iPod from Songbird and synchronize it with your Songbird library using the iPod device Songbird extension. This extension will mount your iPod in Songbird, allowing you to play songs from your iPod library and playlists. This extension also allows you to copy songs to your iPod or synchronize your iPod from your Songbird library.

Songbird 1.0 Improved Performance:

• Drastically Faster Search: Searching in Songbird is now anywhere from 10x faster for small libraries to 1000x for large ones.
• Reduced RAM Usage: There’s a 70% reduction in RAM usage when importing and using large (100,000 track) libraries.
• Faster Media Importing: Importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.
• Reduced Startup Times: Large library users (10,000 tracks or more) will notice that Songbird startup times are now twice as fast.
• Efficient Scrolling: Scrolling through your library now uses half the amount of CPU.
• Snappier Sorting: Sorting your library is now 3-4x faster, which adds up to significantly smoother browsing when scrolling and filtering.
• Optimized DB Size: We’ve optimized the database in Songbird and reduced its size by, on average, 60%. This leads to a variety of performance improvements throughout the application.
• Fewer Crashers: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix 11 of the most common crashes in Songbird.

If you are running Ubuntu 8.10 you know it didn’t come with the latest version of Open Office.  If you want to run Open Office 3, Softpedia has a quick guide to show you how.

If you want to upgrade you can do so via these steps.

If you have not yet upgraded to Gimp 2.6, I found this guide to be really useful if you are running Linux.

If you are an open source fan you probably already know about Mozilla Thunderbird which is a MS Outlook competitor.  I just installed Mozilla Lightning today which is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing it to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks.