I watched the screencast of Song Bird today and have some thoughts. While Songbird's slant is most likely towards music, there's no reason why everything in the demo screencast can't be applied to podcasts.
Playing Media
I didn't see anything that blew me away about playing media If you click on an MP3 files in a webpage, Song Bird will play it. I get that same effect now using Firefox and the embedded MPlayer. Songbird will also show you all of the media in a particular webpage and allow you to drag it to your local media library. Again, I get the same effect by simply right-clicking and Save so I didn't see anything revolutionary there.
Finding Music
This is a little cooler. The demo starts out by typing in the name of an artist into a search box that looks just like the one in Firefox. The drop down list box of search engines, however, is populated with music seach engines such as Elbows and Singing Fish. Not bad.
When you find music you like, you can subscribe to the music site/blog in question and Songbird will download all of the audio in that subscription daily. Hmm...sound useful for podcasts, no?
So again, no major crazy new functionality, but as I watch more of the screencast I'm starting to appreciate how it's all coming together. The part where all of the music tracks on Music is Art are displayed in the web play list helps understand how it works.
Watching Video
Well...pretty much what you'd expect here. Click video, video plays.
Singbird promises that changing skins (called feathers) will be as easy as updating a My Space page. I hope to God the skins look better than a My Space page because that is one uuuugly website.
As stated, Songbird isn't quite ready yet but if you're a bleeding edge type you can download Almost 0.2 Test Flight for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.
