Oh, the tease! The "Songbird":http://www.songbirdnest.com/ team has been toying with us for weeks with "screenshots":http://www.songbirdnest.com/roblord/blog/songbird_screenshots and blog posts. It was said version 0.1 will be out next week after christmas, and I hope it will be.

Not that I don't like iTunes. It has served me well. But there were one too many of those database crashes that wipe out all your painstalkingly built ratings. And it can benefit from being about 3 times faster. In my book, mimicking OSX apps doesn't warrant taking up so much resources.

Songbird promises to be media player and more. The things I've been looking forward to are:

* Accessing more than one online music stores.
* "SQLite":http://www.sqlite.org/ database
* Built-in "Audioscrobbler":http://www.audioscrobbler.net/ support
* Not being forced to install QuickTimes
* (hopefully) better podcast integration than iTunes
* iPod support
* The interface. It's similar enough to iTunes, which is a good thing. Ten they fixed some of the UI flaws that iT suffers from.

The fact the site runs on "Drupal":http://drupal.org adds 5 points. :)