Alphabetization: Part III

In what I think may be the first truly novel brows­ing envi­ron­ment devel­oped for Song­bird, ♪Photo dis­plays your library as a pile of artist pho­tos pulled from Last.fm. They can be dragged around and rearranged, and their ori­en­ta­tion is remem­bered between Song­bird ses­sions. In my test­ing it is unus­ably slow, how­ever it is remark­ably excit­ing to see inno­va­tion like this before Song­bird is even out of beta. It would be an easy mat­ter to imple­ment a “snap” fea­ture that would clus­ter sim­i­lar artists together based on Last.fm data, or to pro­vide an alter­nate view by album cover rather than artist photo — hon­estly, who can rec­og­nize some of these artist photos?

Any­way, as it’s only a cou­ple weeks old I’m sure it will improve, and it demon­strates just what amaz­ing things can be done with the Song­bird plat­form. Hope­fully we’ll see more dar­ing and clever exten­sions like this when Song­bird hits 1.0 next month. I’m con­sid­er­ing mak­ing it my full-time player in order to col­lect more sta­tis­tics (play dates, play counts, added dates, etc.).