Birdwatching (the Songbird thread) (2 Viewers)

Martin

Senior Member
Dec 31, 2000
56,913
#1
Okay the title is dumb as feck, but this deserves it's own thread dammit. Imagine this. A music player that aims to challenge amarok on coolness. Don't believe it? It's true. A project launched by a San Francisco outfit backed by big VC money is putting out an open source (yes, that's not a typo) music player that aims to strive for the very echelons of coolness, which means challenging amarok to a duel. In the process, of course, planning to slay posers such as Windows Media Player and iTunes.

That's right, get ready to experience Songbird. What's so special about it, you ask. First of all, it's built on XUL, the funky xml technology that gave you Firefox and Thunderbird, so Songbird is built with portability in mind. This means an integrated browser (gecko) in the player, as well as support for extensions (like Firefox). And it's skinnable.

Imagine that, a cross platform music player, it would be the world's first [decent one]. It also has extremely native podcast [god I hate that word, f you Apple] support, with built-in searches for podcasts via rss feeds on websites. It will also have integration with a bunch of web stores for try/buy functionality.

But above all, for once a daring and innovative music player. Winamp was great in 1998, but it hasn't changed much since then. WMP is a pile of trash, whereas iTunes embodies that we-know-what's-best-for-you straight jacket so consistent across Apple's applications.

You heard it here first: http://www.songbirdnest.com/

What's the big woop? Songbird is very new, it's not even out of the shop yet. Currently there's only a 0.2 developer preview release that's buggy and tends to crash. But this is where we witness an application being built from the very start. Songbird has taken lots of notes from Firefox and is pushing hard for branding, product name, trademark, t-shirt, release parties and so on, so you'll definitely be hearing a lot about this project.

Needless to say, the bird got nothing on amarok. Yet. But with the momentum it has, it's going to be exciting seeing how this project evolves.

Mods: sticky please.
 

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Chxta

Onye kwe, Chi ya ekwe
Nov 1, 2004
12,088
#10
After extensive testing, I will stick with Amarok. But considering that the Songbird is still under development, we will get back in due course to see how far...
 

gray

Senior Member
Moderator
Apr 22, 2003
30,260
#11
Wanna write a quick review for us Chet? :D

If that's not convenient an extensive review will do
 
Jan 7, 2004
29,704
#12
gray said:
Wanna write a quick review for us Chet? :D

If that's not convenient an extensive review will do

let me try.

"it's not a bad program, but considering [insert thing that happens in nigeria] i have to [insert thing that people in nigeria do when those things happen]"
 

swag

L'autista
Administrator
Sep 23, 2003
83,476
#18
Not so much for a player, but definitely for the metadata management of a large catalog of media files (something that's a necessity for me, especially with my Sonos system), Media Monkey has been great for me. It even has configurable rules-based synching and directory formatting with my mp3 player. :tup:

Songbird will need to top that for me to bother...
 

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