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

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....

(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.

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.

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.

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.