The folks behind the Songbird music app for Windows, Mac, and Linux have launched the first beta version of Songbird for Android. So far it looks like a nice, light-weight music player which does a good job of managing your music collection and letting you control playback from the app or a home screen widget.
Aside from a slightly more attractive interface, there’s not really that much to set Songbird for Android apart from the default Android music player. But there are two special features: You can login to Facebook to “like” a song as it plays, and you can click the Flickr icon to view artist photos from a Flickr photostream.
The app sorts your music by artist, song title, album, genre or playlist. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to create playlists using the Songbird app, but you should be able to stream playlists created using other apps. There’s also a search tool built into the app for finding songs by keyword.
My favorite feature? The whole thing weighs in at just around 1MB, which means that while Songbird currently doesn’t offer much that you don’t get from Google’s music app, it doesn’t cost you much storage space to keep Songbird around.
The current version of Songbird for Android is a test release that’s set to expire in 4 weeks. Once the full app is available from the Android Market, you’ll need to uninstall this version before installing the updated app.
Songbird will eventually offer an API allowing third party developers to work with it, which could enable support for add-ons and other functionality although it’s unlikely that most desktop add-ons for Songbird will find their way to the mobile app for somewhat obvious reasons.
The test version of Songbird for Android is available for download from the Songbird web site.
via Download Squad
