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Well, not really no. Vista’s built in speech recognition is better than some I’ve used such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, mainly thanks to the fact that it is built into Windows & doesn’t seem to hog resources. It also has a scarily accurate command system which is actually very, very accurate. Dictation though is about as much use as a ‘fizzy fart’.
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Well lot’s of you probably know about this little gem but for those of you that don’t I’m going to let you in on a little secret. It’s called Songbird.
Songbird is basically the Firefox of media players. It’s lightweight, supports nearly any format you can imagine including FLAC & OGG and has lots of stylish skins, feathers as songbird calls them, to choose from.
The interface is very friendly & those who are used to using iTunes will feel right at home, users of WMP(like me) might need a little time to adjust to a different layout but it’s very easy to learn. Another of Songbirds best features is probably the add-ons. Just like Firefox, Songbird has numerous add-ons. These add things like iPod support, different layouts, album cover flipper(like the iTunes one) and so on.
Songbird also comes with an inbuilt browser for browsing the web while listening to your music. Add-ons can also be developed for the browser alone. There are already ports of certain Firefox add-ons available at the Songbirdnest.
Now for a few things that I feel are missing. There doesn’t seem to be any support for CD Ripping, although I understand there are probably licensing issues there, especially for a free, open source program. Finally I feel there should be a stop button as standard instead of having to use a add-on to get it but that’s just my personal opinion.
Anyway overall Songbird is an excellent media player for anyone who is sick of iTunes or WMP dominating the media player arena. It even has features that social networking nuts will love. 
Definitely the best free, open source media player available for windows, and maybe one of the best for mac and linux too.
Hope you liked this little review of Songbird. If you have used it and want to tell everyone about your experiences with Songbird then please leave a comment below.
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