WOTSOP

So in lieu of a hilarious anecdote, I figured I'd just tell you what I've been up to.
I recently figured I'd try out a music playing app I keep seeing around. It looked nice, but I've been a huge winamp fan since the late 90's. I can't say enough great things about winamp; it lets you totally customize things, from skins to little gadgets to letting you code your own visualizations (something I got WAY into for a year or two). And with Winamp's global hotkeys I could be surfing the web and changing tracks effortlessly. Winamp might still be my favorite as far as STRICT music player, but I've got to say, this new thing is a blast.
It's called Songbird, and it's based on Mozilla's Firefox. This is awesome because you can choose what songs you want to play, and then open up a new tab to browse the net. Of course, Songbird's browser isn't QUITE as awesome as Firefox, but for lazy browsing it's awesome.
Another really cool aspect of Songbird is the addons. Similar to Firefox, Songbird can be tricked out with some pretty badass janks, for instance, the pic above demonstrates the "Media Flow" addon, which takes all the album covers of all of your albums and allows you to scroll through and pick which album you want to listen to VISUALLY. There's also a plugin that displays the playlist in a bar to the right of your browser, making picky tune listening and web-browsing just about seamless.
But here's the part that I'm just getting into, and it seems like a real dealbreaker: Subscribing to websites.
Some websites have direct links to mp3's. These are most commonly just blogs that show off weird tunes that you've probably never heard of, and some gems that you thought you'd never hear again. For instance, one of my favorites it WFMU's Beware of the Blog. When you browse over to the site, Songbird has this tendency to show you all of the direct link mp3's in a panel right under the browser. You can click the download link to download the mp3 to your harddrive, or if you feel so psyched about the site you're on, and you know that it will be updated with more tunes that you TOTALLY NEED, you can right-click on the website and Subscribe to the site. It will ask you where to put the files, and how often you want to update your collection, and Songbird will automatically download subsequent updates!
Try it on my website! GAUTEKKER (or who knows, maybe I'll post some tunes here someday!)

Speaking of Music Blogs, there are hundreds of them out there linking to full albums hosted on sites like Rapidshare. Some of them are blatantly illegal, but a lot of them are dedicated to really unknown artists who (for the most part) get off on people sharing thier stuff. One that I've really browsed to death is Mutant Sounds, a really off the wall collection of odd albums.
Anyways, with this massive downloading quest, prepare to use Google Images a lot for finding album covers.
I just wish Songbird featured CD ripping and burning capabilities.
You can get Songbird at http://www.getsongbird.com

Peaceout til next time