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.

Are new features a priority over resource usage? Or is this a hiccup from being <1.0 that will be addressed before release?

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.

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.

Oh, so they’re a Y Combinator startup?

(I kid.)

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.

The last.fm integration, automatic lyrics display and Wikipedia integration are some of my favorite add-ons.

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.

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

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

Hoping for some nice improvements, I try it out every few months…