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, speedier track importing, and a more polished interface among a number of other features. The resulting application is a marked improvement over the last release we covered, but still has a few rough edges that continue to make it ideal for early adopters in the music scene rather than the general consumer.
Songbird is looking to provide users an alternative to the closed, DRM-laden music stores offered by Apple and a number of other companies. The software behaves like a mix between iTunes (it now features nearly identical icons) and Mozilla’s Firefox (it uses the same engine as the web browser). The software also supports plugins for portable devices like the iPod, and even slightly modified Firefox extensions. The result may be a bit confusing at first, but the interface is familiar enough that it only takes a few moments to adjust to combination.
Songbird allows web developers to integrate a very professional music store on their sites by tapping into the application’s API. After browsing to a supported site, Songbird will display a list of available songs at the bottom of the application in a manner that is strongly reminiscent of iTunes. While we’ve seen other interfaces that look equally professional, replicating the iTunes UI which users are already familiar with is likely to help boost sales.
I never got Songbird. I tried it over a year ago (amazing they’re still around) and it looked like an overbloated and unpolished iTunes with a very dark skin. One cool thing I liked about it was that it allowed you to search music on web pages. But most of the music/sites they showcased had pretty crappy music.
And you’re absolutely right about it having “confusing” interface. It’s again one of those frankenapps that try to do too much. Crappy browser experience + a crappy music player experience does not equal a killer app.
Dave, this is open source unlike iTunes. iTunes’ look and feel are decided by Apple. Songbird’s look and feel are decided by YOU. There are many themes (even WMP and iTunes themes) and plugins such as Ad-block plus, ect. The .7 alpha builds have had many interface improvements that make Songbird .7 much easier to use than .6.
Eli, opensource is overrated. Who said having lots of (bad) choices is good? I suggest a book “Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz.
Dave & Eli,
I work at Songbird and could not have asked for a better case study of who Songbird is for and who it’s not for.
If you care about being able to customize your music player, if you install lots of add-ons in Firefox, if you don’t want to be locked into proprietary players, and you want to manage your music collection with open software, Songbird is probably a good fit for you. Sounds like Eli falls into that camp.
If you don’t really think open source is important (or it always disappoints you), if you don’t tend to customize your software experiences, and if you are not into being a part of a community that tolerates an occasional missing feature, you should wait to try Songbird. It sounds like Dave falls into this camp.
Eli, we welcome you. Dave, we hope to meet your needs soon, but don’t try us yet.
Thanks both for your comments.
For the Eli’s among you, we’ll be live later tonight (Aug. 20) or tomorrow. Some features Jason did not mention:
- Concert tour dates for all the artists in your Songbird library (powered by the folks at Songkick.com)
- Smart Playlists
- FLAC file playback
@Dave open source means you can have as few choices as you want, but you need to be ready to get your hands dirty, go and hack up your take on what a music browser should be, recompile it and release
If your fork is good people will favor your version with few choices and maybe even the main project adopt some of your wise choices.
In the end everybody wins
Harry and The Potters, really?, Harry and The Potters? Someone at Songbird is an ubernerd…I mean, if you are down with Wizard Rock you are the Albus Dumbledore of Nerdwarts.
Expelliarmus.
I heard of this before but never checked it out.
The add-ons sound great, so I’ll give it a shot.
dMix. Glad you’re interested. This article hit earlier than we thought it would, the beta should be available tonight or tomorrow at that latest at getsongbird.com.
Songbird ROCKS. I love it. The feedback mechanism for bugs and features is amazing.
songbird sucks, it’s completely useless. the only people who will say positive things on here are ones getting paid by them, like Ethan Bauman. the delay in release is very typical of them. their funding can’t dry up soon enough. throw some more shit parties guys and lets get this over with.
Carlo,
To clear up any misconceptions, our release is not delayed. We briefed TechCrunch prior to our launch, and they opted to go live with the story immediately. In fact, if you look back over time our releases have been getting closer and closer together.
I’d also like to extend an invitation to you to come into the Songbird offices and review comments from our community who don’t collect a pay check, about why they like and use Songbird. If you’d like to schedule some time, hit me up at ethan [at] songbirdnest [dot] com.
BTW- not trying to get you to use Songbird. We’re not for everyone.
@carlo
I am not paid by Songbird, Songbird is not my main music player at the moment and I still say positive things about the project in every opportunity I have.
Just the contribution in documenting and providing source code example of a real application built on top of XUL Runner would be reason enough for me.
But the project is much more than that, for people that spend good part of their lives listening to music, having a free (as in freedom) application for music browsing, and to know that you have control over it is priceless.
But I agree with Ethan, it is not for everyone, specially not the Tech Crunch crowd, I don’t think “control”, “freedom”, “hacking” or even “fun” have become the hype buzzworld of the week just yet.
Wait for SocialSooongBird.
FYI – Beta has been released
Hoping for some nice improvements, I try it out every few months…
Actually songbird has come a long ways. Since my abandonment of the windows platform years ago I have needed an alternative to winamp and songbird is quite nice. I run Ubuntu and OSX on my home computers.
I use iTunes because I buy from the store on OSX. However, there are 2 areas where iTunes falls short.
1) winamp’s visualizations and interface customizations. iTunes has 2 sizes: useless non-descript box and maximized. Although it has a visualizer (a pretty good one at that) it’s not very customizable (i.e. running in a separate window etc).
2) doesn’t run on linux (and likely never will)
For Ubuntu songbird has the potential to be the ipod sync tool for linux. (Be careful not to wipe the harddrive on your ipod the first time *cough*) However, I’m still waiting on the visualizer for OSX… :p
I LOVE Songbird. If you’re a music crackhead, like myself, there’s no better tool to get your music fix. To have the power of iTunes and Firefox with out the DRM hassles is a beautiful thing. It’s been a huge timesaver for me. I read most of my favorite music blog sites using Songbird, have playlists set up that automatically downloads MP3s from these sites into the folder of my choosing. Now if Songbird would only integrate with Sonos (like Rhapsody), it would be absolutely perfect!
I just downloaded Songbird for the first time and so far I love it. The base install doesn’t offer much more than you get with iTunes but once you start installing the add-ons it’s amazing. It reminds me of when I started using Firefox.
The last.fm integration, automatic lyrics display and Wikipedia integration are some of my favorite add-ons.
“replicating the iTunes UI which users are already familiar with is likely to help boost sales.” sales of what? it’s free.
The software is open source but it still operates as a business in the way the Firefox team does. They also raised $8 in VC.
I think more people above need to try out the beta Songbird before commenting. This reminds me of moving to Firefox from IE way back. It still needs a lot of polish but it has potential.
They raised eight dollars?
Oh, so they’re a Y Combinator startup?
(I kid.)
Last time I checked (a year ago maybe) songbird was big, slow, clumsy and bloated application – some of those problems came probably from basing it on Mozilla technology, but some others were there ‘by design’ so I don’t see many chances for them being fixed – after all Singbird’s inspiration is iTunes which by itself is a major mistake, they should instead look more closely at things like foobar2000 (slim, lightweight, powerful music player) and amarok (music library done right) – whith Amarok2 (which will work on Linux, Win, Mac) being just behind the corner I don’t see much space for Songbird
That’s what themes (feathers in songbird’s case) are for.
They got rid of the farting bird?
I use Songbird in Windows to supplement XMPlay and use it instead of Amarok in Kubuntu. As was said above the TechCrunch and sadly much of the Ars Techniica crowd are really not the right audience the kids on Digg and Slashdot are a lot closer to the core user audience.
The new Songbird beta is absolutely amazing!@ You must install it and give it a chance. I am so impressed at how far this project has come.
You would have to be a real muppet to not understand why iTunes is evil and Songbird is going to offer us the freedom to buy and enjoy music has been lost in this long and awkward transition to digital music.
Huge cheers for an open source music program to disrupt the evil corporate DRM paradigm.
If you installed this program a year ago…. it has come a long way.
@Dave:
How can you possibly give a fair opinion on Songbird if you haven’t used it the past year? A lot of changes have been made and there’s a bunch of really innovative add-ons.
I use Songbird on a daily basis and browsing the web is no problem for me.
There’s still a whole lot more to expect from this bird, so I recommend you to take a look in the Roadmap.
I tried .6 for a few weeks and the resource usage made using it while working prohibitive. Did that improve? It doesn’t look or feel like it with .7.
Are new features a priority over resource usage? Or is this a hiccup from being <1.0 that will be addressed before release?
As a developer of an “open” social network platform we are always looking at ways of using and enhancing open source products to make our site better (and improve the existing code we adapt).
Songbird is a great idea – however one thing for third party sites…can sites use it (or a mini version) as a modifiable standalone rich media player (”powered by Songbird”) on their sites (Iike yahoo’s media player) or is it’s usability tied to those who are browsing using songbird?
The latter is obviously less attractive even if it is open source.