DMC TV – DMC World DJ Championships.

A move that in keeping with the current economic climate, and the acquisition of last.fm by CBS, means that users outside of the 3 lucky countries will have to pay a subscription fee of €3 a month. Of course, if you have access to a particularly fast proxy server in one of those countries, you can escape the charge..

But then, how they ever thought they would sell the product with this advert is anybodies guess. Made using the creator’s own money, it demonstrates the software and how well it works – don’t worry if you don’t make it to the end – it’s a bit of an abomination.

AAAGGHHHH!!! Well there is good news from this evil creation – For one thing this particular video has gone viral (for all the wrong reasons of course) but most importantly, people have taken it into their hearts to isolate the singing from well known songs and pass it through Songsmith – and the results are hilarious!

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as performed by Songsmith. The program has really captured the essence of this song I think… Er.. OK I’ll be quiet now.

Absolute GENIUS! I couldn’t believe how amazing this sounds! It’s like, Oasis meets Snap!!

I just know Survivor are going to love this rendition of their classic "Eye of the Tiger" from the Rocky films. Songsmith has really outdone itself this time!

What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here. Indeed – lyrics that are relevant in more ways than you realised Mr Yorke. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Radiohead’s Creep – Songsmith stylee.

And finally I give you Billy Idol’s White Wedding, with Songsmith playing the backing in a "bluegrass" style. It truly is a marvel to behold!

Now you know what to search for, make your way over to YouTube and it shouldn’t take you long to find some amazing remixes. Of course, you can also download the demo of Microsoft’s Songsmith and see what auditory delights you can set loose on the world!

Songbird has been in the works for a long time, with the project started nearly 3 years ago, in February of 2006. Since then the music player has seen lots of differences to appearances and usability, but everything being forward thinking and progressive. Sadly missing with this release is iPhone or iPod Touch support, however, but Songbird does still support other iPods & MP3 players – and I’m sure it will be fixed very soon (it’s on their list of high priority bugs). Audio enclosures in RSS feeds (podcasts) are supported, along with SHOUTcast radio integration (much like many media players) and also last.fm support.

This project is exciting and I’m glad to see the first major release, as I’ve been keeping my eye on the media player for a long time. The interface is very clean and inviting, which looks and feels like iTunes – although seems to be slightly less responsive than it’s heavily funded cousin. Podcasts are a little hidden to start with as well (cryptically under the menu as "New Subscription…"). But thankfully, as it’s written around the Mozilla code base (like Firefox & Thunderbird) you know that it’s going to be stable and functional. The player has the ability to have add-ons installed, much like Firefox, to help with things like different music formats (like quick-time, or protected Windows Media files) and other features like the ability to book concert tickets through songkick.com. It also supports tabbed browing, and is very functional surfing the net – with an added bonus that any audio feeds found on the page will pop up for you to download or play in Songbird.

There are more features on the way, and a growing collection of add-ins available. But then in it’s very first release, the team behind Songbird said, "…take a long hard look in the direction we’re pointing. We assure you, this is just the beginning" so we can be sure Songbird isn’t going to stop with version 1. To have a look, and support the project, you can download the latest version from the getsongbird website.