Comments on: Web-Integrated Media Player Songbird Releases v0.3

By: Songbird Takes Flight With 1.0 Release

Songbird Takes Flight With 1.0 Release — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:19:36 +0000

[...] has launched its 1.0 milestone release to the public. The browser, which we’ve covered extensively since it was first announced back in 2005, offers a number of features that make it an appealing [...]

By: Mixwit’s Mixtapes and Broader Social Media Ambitions

Mixwit’s Mixtapes and Broader Social Media Ambitions — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:59:39 +0000

[...] junkies. It would also be a browser-based cousin of Songbird, a Mozilla-based desktop app that also strives to be the web’s media [...]

By: Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player | SesliChat Sesli Sohbet

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:19:01 +0000

[...] this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, [...]

By: Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player | Business Online Matters

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:56:37 +0000

[...] this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, [...]

By: Technology news - Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player

Technology news - Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:41:45 +0000

[...] Later this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, [...]

By: Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player | aboutCREATION

Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player | aboutCREATION — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:29:05 +0000

[...] this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, [...]

By: Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player

Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:35:43 +0000

[...] this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, [...]

By: Louis Choquel

Louis Choquel — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:43:27 +0000

Integrating content into media players this way provides a great user experience. And it’s also a business: we have been doing this at zSlide with our White Label solution “Omega Media Player” :
http://www.omeg...ediaplayer.com/

It’s been successfully used for music and VOD for 2 years, our biggest client being Orange, the European giant telco.

By: Web-Integrated Media Player Songbird Releases v0.3 - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:54:25 +0000

[...] might for Firefox, since the application’s architecture is fundamentally the same. (via TC) __________________ I Dyslexia ♥ "Couldn’t afford a car so she named her daughter [...]

By: enefekt

enefekt — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:31:20 +0000

12 – AIR Beta 2 has a synchronous database API:
http://labs.ado...e_AIR_Beta_2.3F

13 – “whether they considered switching over to AIR, they said they preferred Mozilla’s open source nature and ease with which to build larger, more complex, projects”

Yeah, add to that an existing codebase and a large number of hours already invested with Mozilla technologies. I would think that would be a horrible idea to switch to a different technology too, no matter what it was. (Unless there were some do-or-die emergency)

So maybe just stating that as a standalone opinion, not as part of a decision made to intentionally avoid AIR.

By: Ronald Lewis

Ronald Lewis — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:21:04 +0000

#7 — And your point is what? Nothing. Don’t be a coward on TechCrunch.

By: Walter Naeslund

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:59:37 +0000

Walled gardens can only be walled if what’s within those walls is darn good. What the music industry has been trying so far is to do stuff that actually makes what’s inside those walls inferior by introducing limitations to the products and even Spyware (shame on you Sony).

What IS better than iTunes AND better than songbird would in my opinion be Spotify. Here we’re talking blazing fast searches (faster than local iTunes searches on my machine), quality metadata, great sound quality and what seems to be a very compact and well written piece of software.

By: Martin Edic

Martin Edic — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:38:43 +0000

iTunes is a browser, a dedicated one (it only retrieves data from one place). I suspect we’re going to see a web-based version of iTunes in the very near future which, if it happens, kills this project.
As a non-technical person I don’t want what AIR offers- I want all my apps to be online and don’t care about desktop apps. To me the desktop is looking more and more like a backup solution rather than a workspace.

By: Mark Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:28:02 +0000

11 – Very true, they were developing Songbird before AIR. But when I asked them whether they considered switching over to AIR, they said they preferred Mozilla’s open source nature and ease with which to build larger, more complex, projects.

By: CD

CD — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:53:24 +0000

@11 AIR has several things missing from it. One reason why I don’t consider it for some my projects is due to synchronous DB (SQLite) calls. It’s a hack to implement business logic through lots of asynchronous calls to a persistence layer.

By: enefekt

enefekt — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:27:37 +0000

I’m very excited about Songbird, and it’s extensibility.

“Songbird turned to Mozilla technology for its product … other possible web-to-desktop platforms, like AIR, were not created with an open source philosophy nor designed well enough for large-scale projects.”

Wasn’t Songbird developing it’s product long before AIR/Apollo was even known about? Not saying that Mozilla wouldn’t have been the best choice for them anyway.

I agree XULRunner/Mozilla is an awesome technology to target multiple OSs, and has been my first choice for desktop apps for awhile. But now that Adobe AIR is about to reach 1.0, and Mozilla 2.0 is just getting ready to shake things up, I will be leaning more towards AIR as a solution. I see no reason why it can’t handle large-scale projects.

By: Dane

Dane — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:34:39 +0000

This is probably the most exciting application that’s come out in a while. I’d really like to see someone do something like this for A/V chat. Yes, there is Pidgin, but I’d like to see the extensibility engine of Mozilla come into play.

By: Janko

Janko — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:30:28 +0000

One of the more interesting aspects of using the Mozilla code is that Songbird now supports Greasemonkey scripts:

http://www.p2p-...m/item-398.html

By: Mike Rundle

Mike Rundle — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:23:34 +0000

It’s so cool to see a company doing some awesome work with XUL, it’s such an underutilized technology now that everybody is bracing for Air.

By: i'm Ronald Lewis

i'm Ronald Lewis — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:25:37 +0000

I’ve long feared, that one day – my sins would catchup with me…and the price, is more than I can bare to pay.

By: Nicholas Macias

Nicholas Macias — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:21:00 +0000

Songbird looks great. Device-makers that aren’t Apple or Microsoft should pay attention to this one.

Good job, Ian & team.

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:32:43 +0000

Finally? An update? Ah great! Now I have to wait the rest of the week to update it back home XD

By: PookieBadMuffin

PookieBadMuffin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:32:07 +0000

“…iTunes that you don’t really realize that you are browsing a website when looking for music to buy.”

Right. Except for the massive load times, the timeouts, the error messages. It’s atrocious and slow. Not to mention, lately, you have to download/update the entire app monthly.

This is why music services should run in the browser like Amazon – and Songbird. Kudos to them for sticking with this idea.

“Also, other possible web-to-desktop platforms, like AIR, were not created with an open source philosophy nor designed well enough for large-scale projects.”

Good grief. Why would you say such a thing? The runtime isn’t open source (yet), but development is and you can build large-scale projects *easily*.

By: james

james — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:26:04 +0000

the SkreemR link goes to insound
correct link is http://skreemr.com

By: Stu

Stu — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:10:34 +0000

This just makes sense and I like it. It seems those companies that survive on walled-garden business models are not having a good day. Are the discussions with Amazon complete or ongoing ?