1. mashTape – This is one of the first things that made me fall in love with Songbird and remains one of my favourite add-ons. mashTape fetches relevant information about the currently playing track from the web. The main pane shows artist biography, members of the band, discography, and related links fetched from last.fm. It also displays album reviews from Amazon and latest info related to the singer fetched from a number of sources including Google News, Yahoo! News, Google Blogsearch, HypeMachine and Digg. But my favourite feature is the cool slideshow composed of related photos from flickr. And oh yeah, before I forget mashTape also fetches relevant videos from YouTube and Yahoo! Music.
2. Now Playing List - Songbird doesn’t contain a Now Playing list (like Windows Media Player or Winamp) that allows you to quickly drag and drop songs and create custom temporary playlists on the fly. This can be a deal breaker for some (including me). Thankfully, there is an add-on that allows you to add a Now Playing List pane.
3. MediaFlow - I love the iTunes like Filter View present in Songbird. However, if you prefer the flashier Coverflow then MediaFlow is the add-on you are looking for. However, this plug-in does have some performance issues.
4. Equalizer Presets - Songbird finally got an equalizer with its latest release. And it’s a pretty good one. Unfortunately it doesn’t include any presets. Manually tuning a 10-band equaliser according to different types of music is just too much work for me. Thankfully for lazy bums like me GeekShadow has done all the hard work. Go ahead and install this add-on to get some much needed equaliser presets.
5. Metadata Tools - This add-on comes in handy when you are tagging your files. Metadata tools add the option to automatically fill in metadata from filenames. Another nice thing about this tool is that is adds an additional filter to the Filter View – Album Artist. I prefer using this over individual artists as a filter.
6. The Exorcist - The Exorcist allows you to locate broken and missing tracks as well as duplicate tracks. It uses track name, artist name, length and other metadata information to locate duplicate tracks. This is a pretty handy add-on to have and is useful if you want to clean up your media library
7. Song Notifier - Just as the name suggests this add-on displays a little notification window (toaster) whenever a new song starts playing. Additional options include ability to include album cover and specify the icon used in Song Notifier.
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