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

Amen

[layer3switch]

"Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said."

Praise the Lord!

News.Context

[TubeSteak]

I like the box off to the left side that helps put things in context

What's new:
A five-person company called Pioneers of the Inevitable is taking aim at Apple's iTunes with music software called Songbird that's based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.

Bottom line:
  The first technical preview of Songbird isn't expected until early next year, but it has already stirred up a hornet's nest of online critics and supporters on blogs and even on the company's own Web site.

I'll be more impressed if they code something that isn't buggy and prone to exploits, than if they manage to one up iTunes.

MusicKube

[Piroca]

I guess that MusikCube fits better in the description of an "open source iTunes" counterpart.

(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.

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.

Re:Judging by their screenshots...

[TomHandy]

That's really not fair to say that the entire company is based on taking the best ideas out of other UIs and then modifying them. Certainly they have done that, but Apple also contributed a lot of wholly original ideas and innovations that hadn't been seen before (I'm not going to recount them all here, it is discussed in other histories of GUI development, especially at Xerox PARC and Apple).