Songbird the Open Source iTunes?

An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"

Comments

Re: title

[viksit]

Well, its about time someone did do it. Its got immense possibilities - but how would music stores react to it? For all you know, they might (as in the case of IE) have ActiveX controls/or propreitary media formats which tell you to go and use their own software.. or activate some locks/feature constrictions which would be solved given time, but would still render the service unusable.

I remember Fairplay (or was it Playfair), the tool which allowed encoded Apple music files to be played on any MP3 player - what a ruckus that caused!

I read about this about 2 days ago though - is this is a sign that /. is falling behind the times?

It's not the store, it's the licensing

[TubeSteak]

It isn't really the clients that prevent you, it is the companies' unwillingness to open their DRM schema without prohibitive licensing costs.

On to the article:

Lord cautioned that little of this has actually been built yet. The version that will be released early next year will largely be a demonstration of how a media player can be built on top of the Mozilla technology. Most of the advanced features people now expect from modern music software will be added over the course of further development, he said.

So this is just a product announcement.

How does this all make money? It's not yet clear. The company's business model is a work in progress too, Lord said.

One possibility is selling the technology to companies that want to create their own music store, but don't want to build their own software to do it...

Nothing to see here, move along....

Its just an updated firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

But this gets me wondering, maybe the web browser shouldn't be splitting up content? On one hand we have Google with tools like AJAX trying to bring everything together in one browsing experience (Video, maps, mail, etc.). On the other, you have extra programs like iTunes and Thunderbird. For both experiences, the kernel is having content being independent of the medium. I would say that having everything blended together is a much better internet experience. Maybe this is what Microsoft was trying to do integrating Internet Explorer into the OS? Or maybe the web browser really is going to be an operating system for the future.

Uh, wait a second..

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't amaroK and Rhythmbox the open source iTunes?

(song)Birds of a Feather, Flock together.

[maztuhblastah]

Anyone remember Flock? Totally magical! Will change the way you browse the web! Will shine your shoes and feed your cat!

Or not. It's essentially Firefox plus some random blog-editing tools and a "pretty" interface. Songbird, IMHO, will be much the same. So far the only feature that people like is the "URL Slurper"... which basically amounts to wget recursively. Don't get me wrong... I'm all for competition, especially when it's Open-Source vs. Closed-Source. That said, I can't see much worth getting hyped up about: the interface is nothing new (but more cluttered than iTunes), the "URL Slurper" isn't anything the world hasn't seen with wget and curl, and I think the project might be at risk legally.

The optimist in me will make sure I download and try it the first day that it's available. The pessimist reminds me that getting hyped up will make me less receptive to a good product.

Re:(song)Birds of a Feather, Flock together.

[maztuhblastah]

I actually agree with you in that it's better than Firefox. My point was that often, these improvement forks often get overhyped to the point where, upon release people say "That's it?" and ignore them. I would love to see Songbird succeed, I really would (I love open source with a passion). I'm just a wee bit irritated when projects get promised as the "next big thing."

The downside to amaroK

[Shawn is an Asshole]

It only works on Linux and other Unix-like systems. It does not work on Windows or the Mac (it is in fink, but audio out doesn't work making it quite useless).

Hopefully it will one day work everywhere, since it is an awesome player. IMHO, amaroK could easily take over if it worked on more platforms.

Re:The downside to amaroK

[The Warlock]

Worse, it only uses the Qt toolkit, so users of Gnome and XFCE have to either turn elsewhere or deal with it looking crappy. Since I don't use KDE, I use Quod Libet, instead. It's a bit like Rhythmbox, except good.

Work with an existing excellent product.

[B5_geek]

Make an add-on for Amarok.
IMHO it is second to none when it come to managing your music collection. Imagine adding an optional Buy-Here tab with x+1 companies to buy your music from.

I have never bought music online, I never will. I would disable any tab that I saw like that in Amarok.

But my point is; Itunes is/was a good jukebox style player. iTunes has it's issues, alas it's not available natively for Linux.

Amarok excells as a music center, AND runs natively in Linux.

Take a hard look at those screenshots...

[msimm]

Its kind of easy to get caught up with the iTunes comparisons. But if you look hard you'll see a url-bar. Its a browser/rss feed-reader with integrated music play/download/management features. Its a damn slick idea. If you read a little bit more about it (either the CNET article or on the songbird site itself) you'll see they've got some great plans to take advantage of the Mozilla code end of things, custom music stores, easy web-based integration for individuals/start-ups/stores.

The project is ambitious. But if it succeeds, it could change the face of the web, at least the music portion of it in a way that's really benificial to us all (musicians included).

Amarok is a great project, but its approach is a a single platform media player/manager. This is a media outlet/portal, with management thrown in for excellent measure.

Of course it may never happen, or it could flop. According to the website we'll all have at least a year to wait before we can declare it anything other then an interesting project. My hat's off to them.

The browser restricts

[poptones]

With Firefox or MSIE I cannot click on a link to download an mp3 and have it play while it's downloading. I can use MS Media (yuck) to download it and play it, but then I have to "save" it somewhere. And in linux I can click on the "part" file if I know to do that or I can use wget and play it as it downloads, but those are both geeky non-easy things for newbies to do.

Having a music shopping app where you can (for example) "audition" a track at a streamable (but ugly) 32kbps then click a "buy" button and have it (and the artwork) automatically download to the proper folder and be available in your playlist immediately would be much easier than just using Firefox or IE to browse generic web pages.

Can't compare with FF

[4D6963]

"And don't forget, just a few years ago, who would have counted on the success of the Firefox browser?"

It's not the same thing. Firefox was made by Mozilla, who made Netscape, IE's past only concurrent. "Firefox vs. IE" is the same "Mozilla vs. Microsoft" that's been on since the first release of Internet Explorer. here, MS's rival only re-bore from its hashes under a new name.

Re:Hopefully its efficient

[Ada_Rules]

However, the bulk of applications available in OSS are indeed bloated and very difficult to port because the C code they were built on was dependant on too many third party shared libraries. ...

People have different coding preferences, I am a minimalist and I like sleek, elegant code that gets a lot of work done in a few lines. Other people prefer to write their code out so that is is more readable to them rather than efficient for the computer. Both systems have their place- don't get me wrong -but for production systems code efficiency is the key. The fewer the number of lines of assembler the compiler must interpret the better.

Moderated to insightful?? Unless you mean that you write all of your C code as inline-assembly this makes no sense at all. And of course if you do mean that then this just mostly makes no sense since the # of lines of assembler the compiler has to interpret may have nothing to do with the efficiency of the code.

There is a strange mixing of concepts between interpreters, compilers, assemblers and random words that I just can't follow.

You were awful close to stringing together enough intellegent sounding pieces of "conventional wisdom", but why do I get the feeling that your code looks like:

for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2 ))P("|"+(*u/4)%2); /P

Re:It's not the client, it's the store

[toddestan]

It isn't iTunes that prevents me from "buying" from any of the other online music stores. It's the clients required by those stores that prevent me.

I'm sure plenty of stores would love to sell songs to iTunes users using Apple's FairPlay DRM. But Apple won't license the DRM, effectively shutting them out. If they try reverse engineering the DRM, Apple will just shut them out (see: Real). So they mostly turn to Microsoft, who seems to be willing to license their DRM'd Windows Media formats to just about anyone.

Re:What?

[gnu-sucks]

Sure, "Buy it now" works just find in a web browser.

Does your web browser have an 8-band graphic EQ? What about full-screen movie playback? Visualizations? Library management? CD Burning? Audio file format conversion? CDDB lookup (sure, there are web frontends for that, but you'd have to manually input the cd's serial number)...

iTunes is a lot more than a "web browser".