VentureBeat

Songbird, the San Francisco start-up that has made a smart music player that searches and plays music on your desktop and on the Web, has raised about $1 million from Atlas Ventures and big name venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital.

It will soon unveil its second release, which has some cool new features. Songbird originally played only on windows, but the coming version will play on other operating systems, including Mac OS and Linux. It began testing the cross-platform release last week, and the new version will be ready over the next week or two.

Check out the screencast below (it is fun, especially the end), to see Songbird’s playing features. Songbird, as you’ll recall, is also browser, where you can browse web sites and find music to play. Songbird searches a site you visit for audio and other files, and displays them neatly at the bottom of the player. You can then click and drag them to your own media library, on your desktop. You can play them any time, and jump to any point in the song.

If you like a song or band, you can use a Web search bar to select from a number of music search engines, such as Scissorkick to find songs from the bands you like. Songbird also lets you subscribe to a music blog, and updates your player with the files as they come in, along with meta data telling you the name of the band, and so on. It can also play video files. Finally, it provides “skins,” or what it calls feathers.

The company’s name is officially Pioneers of the Inevitable. The money will be used as a “bridge” for the company, until it raises a first venture capital round, according to a credible source.

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Tags: co:Pioneers-of-the-Inevitable, co:Songbird, inv:Atlas-Ventures, inv:Sequoia-Capital