Songbird

[Zero3K]

Description from the FileForum listing:

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. It is open source and will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Play any MP3 on the Web without leaving the page. It can view Web pages as dynamic playlists that it can play, save, or automatically download every day. It plays your music too. It has all the features you expect in a desktop media player.

Screenshot:



Homepage: http://www.songbirdnest.com
Download: http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/win32/Songbird_0_1_0.exe
License: Open-Source
IRC chatroom: #Songbird on irc.landoleet.org:6667

[Rover]

Sweet!  This looks pretty cool.  Thanks   

[Carol Haynes]

New article today on internet.com:

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Looks interesting.

I missed this thread the first time round - but it looks interesting esp. if it will play DRMed Windows WMA and Apple's AAC files.

Anyone tried it?

[iphigenie]

When did songbird go from being an open mozilla based project to being "owned" by a startup?

--confused--

[Carol Haynes]

Still says is open source on its homepage

[Lashiec]

Well, Firefox is also open source, but you can consider the Mozilla Foundation an startup of some sorts. Songbird is more or less the same, the source code is available, but since the beginning it was developed by this group, which, obviously, received money from someone. Not sure who, but projects like this don't get developed for free. People have to eat

Carol: I tried it some time ago.

EDIT: D'oh! App? What App? There's no App in this thread!

[iphigenie]

I agree that people have to eat but songbird started under the mozilla umbrella, and suddenly a small subset of the people who worked on it get together and "own" it - at least thats what it looks like to me.

Or maybe they gave every contributor, tester etc. from the past 18 months some shares for free?  Why do I find this unlikely?

[Carol Haynes]

Sorry - why are people complaining?

They are developing it as open source and it is free - where is the problem?

Here are another couple of articles:

http://news.com.com/A+Firefox+for+music/2100-1027_3-6004737.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060208-6144.html

[Lashiec]

No, no, Songbird didn't start under the Mozilla umbrella, it was always developed by Pioneers of the Inevitable. I suppose the Mozilla Foundation gave some funding to this tiny group sometime in their history, just like they did recently with Democracy Player, but so far the only relationship they have is the usage of XULRunner and Bugzilla on Songbird's part, which inevitably leads to some collaboration between the two parts.

For your own interest, some information about the group, and some other about their investors. Essentially they are funded by THE venture capital, as Sequoia Capital also invested in Google and YouTube, among others. It's amazing how the companies mix relationships as the Mozilla Foundation is primarily living on Google's money.

As Carol says, it's free and open source. The only problem is that it's a crappy app, but that's another story

[iphigenie]

Is it? What a shame. It seemed very ambitious - perhaps its trying to tick too many boxes at once?

Could really do with a really workable system to have my laptop connect to my network at home to play my music without logging 60Gb of music files around. Best I found in the end - after trying it with the slimbox, with videolan, with several more video oriented tools... in the end the best way is to use jriver's media centre.

I would rather make something simpler work that doesnt require leaving a software running on a desktop though - after all theres this thing called upnp but the never seems to work

[Lashiec]

It was when I tried it, that was on version 0.2. Have in mind that I also used my old Win98 SE computer, which was under the minimum requirements. I'll test it again on the new one when I have some time, but I feel there would not be many differences.

Essentially, it's trying to compete against iTunes and now Windows Media Player (I was playing with it yesterday, and it left me very impressed). That's tough, and the software it's still at a very early phase. Once it blooms it could be very late for it to make some noise.

Anyway, I don't really like these kind of integrated media players, they end becoming very big, and you only want something to play music, not an entire new SO running inside another. If someone could come up with some new system akin to the iTMS and approved by the W3C (and thus with great possibilities of being integrated in major browsers) that you could integrate easily with your player of choice, it would be really great. The other way around you're trying to reinvent the wheel once and once again, and this solution could be faster to develop, implement and maintain. Of course, you'll need a single sign-on system (utopian right now), dialogue between record houses and software companies (unlikely) and no DRM (EMI started it, let's see if the others follow).

Bah, dreaming is cheap. Going back to your problem, have you looked at the Squeezebox?. I think it's a quite neat solution for home. If you want to connect to your home network without being at home, that's an entirely different story. I can only think in a portable player in that case.

[wreckedcarzz]

Bringing an old thread back up to life...

Songbird is now at 0.3 in its release (just FYI)

I found Songbird by chance yesterday and have already fallen in love with it- despite the early stage release, everything seems to work. I am typing this post in it right now, with my new Blackbird skin on, and my music playing along. There don't seem to be any problems with it as far as I can tell, and anyone that used previous versions but left it because of compatibility or features should give it another go.

Just my opinion, but it is literally perfect for me. It looks friendly like iTunes, works great like musikCube, and runs via Gecko (so just like Firefox). If I could integrate Pidgin into it, I wouldn't need any other program!

[wreckedcarzz]

Update...

Songbird is now in version 0.4

I just downloaded it myself but it looks like the options are all there (finally) and it seems to play songs faster than before.

[Lashiec]

So, it's no longer "reimplementing" Firefox options dialog?

[wreckedcarzz]

So, it's no longer "reimplementing" Firefox options dialog?

It is in a way, but only about 1/2 of it is copied from FF's options. It is the same structure and layout, but there are new tabs and options to set related to song downloads, kotkeys, and other misc stuff.

[Lashiec]

Well, the 0.7 version was released a few days ago, and just like it happened with Firefox, it's starting to be usable. The interface was cleaned up quite a bit, including the options screen, which feels a bit more less Firefox-y. Most of the show-stopping bugs present in past versions are gone, so you can actually use the program as a normal media jukebox, something that was impossible even in 0.6.

I also like the addons available, some are still very rough, but they offer most of the functionality present in the competition, and it's easy to set up them to show around the interface. Which, by the way, it's a cross between iTunes and musikCube. I mean, there's no "Stop" button

Among the bad points, the integration with music services is buggy, some of the tags are not correctly mapped to the proper fields (and no multifield support at the moment), cover art is not present (whether it's embedded or lying around in a folder), and memory usage is HIGH. I guess that can't really be solved.

All in all, they really improved the software between 0.6 and 0.7, and it's starting to look like a competitor for those other jukeboxes. Perhaps it was hyped to hell a bit too soon that it should, but it's trying to live up to the expectations.

[wreckedcarzz]

Yea, I downloaded Songbird 0.7 to both my desktop and laptop, and it is surprisingly nicely laid out and functional. And there has never been a Stop button

I don't use the music services or bookmarks, just music library browsing and playback. It works with my keyboard's media keys, though - something iTunes always had issues with.

I never watch RAM or CPU usage, but it runs on my laptops aged 1.6GHz + 512DDR2 without slowing it to a crawl (my ObjectDock AND RocketDock (I run both at the same time) are not affected), so it can't be THAT bad.

If your into combining programs, and like to listen to music while browsing the WWW, Songbird is worth a shot now more than ever.