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Songbird Flies Today
fr1kk writes to tell us that with the recent advent of a preview version for the new open source response to iTunes, Songbird, BoingBoing has taken a few minutes to interview team lead Rob Lord. While this program may be a great alternative to the DRM ridden iTunes and Windows Media Player platforms it is still only a Windows release. The good news is that by being open source that will (hopefully) not last very long. The Songbird site appears to be swamped right now, but there are several different mirrors available to download the client.
Although I dislike Winamp for it's complexity, I did thoroughly enjoy his simplistic (and very well designed) homepage called "smudges of wisdom."
He seems to be an interesting fellow with odd musical tastes: Also interesting is that he goes through a list of decent books, some of which I'm familiar with. The best part about them is that they aren't at all the typical programming books you'd expect.
My work here is dung.
...the same overwhelming success as Ogg. And for the same reasons.
Unless it syncs with my iPod, I really don't have much use for it. Honestly, that's where my music listening is done, not in my office at my computer...
It can connect to classes of service that haven't been invented yet? Impressive. I shall go away and ponder the transdimensional time-travelling inplications of this statement. Over a large brandy.
Cheers,
Ian
it's always nice to see someone doing what's been done before, only prettier, with a GPL, no support and random crashes.
Is there a SongSomething extension to rename this program? I prefer Songfox to Songbird...
Go, and never darken my towels again! -- Rufus
As far as I know, and I may be wrong here, iTunes will play standard mp3's. At least mine does. So what would the "...a great alternative to the DRM ridden iTunes..." gain you? I would rather have a player that can play drm'd songs, if I were forced to play a few, and still be able to play standard mp3's.
Source code.
Well - thats pretty much answered in the article:How many people write extensions for firefox? Not many, but how many people enjoy said extensions?
The source being available mightent directly benefit most people who use an open source program, but they sure as hell benefit from others having access to the source....
My pics.
I didnt see a menu for proxy settings in the app. Might be helpful for those who are at work right now.
You can add the following lines into your config.js in the Songbird directory.
pref("network.proxy.http", "type proxy here in quotes");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", YOURPROXYPORT);
pref("network.proxy.type", 1);
Of course, replace the port and proxy values, and you're in. Its based on firefox, so I just got the settings from the Firefox config and changed from user_pref() to pref().
How exactly is iTunes "DRM ridden"? Here's my take on iTunes: it's free, it's got a decent feature set, and it's easy to use. Other than if you need to run it on an unsupported OS, what's the problem? The only DRM is for songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, and even that DRM is pretty non-invasive. If you don't want Apple's DRM (queue whining about not being able to play iTMS music on non-iPod MP3 players), just get your music elsewhere. Rip it from CD into numerous formats with pretty solid codecs. Buy standard MP3s from some place like allofmp3.com. Download it (legally, of course) from the 'net.
Honestly, if the software "just works", doesn't force DRM on you, and has the features you need, why spend the time making a product that just attempts to do the same thing? Are there compelling new features in SongBird that iTunes doesn't provide? The way I see it, iTunes is a very nice, free digital audio player that also has the ability to sync with an iPod and use iTMS if you want to take advantage of those things. If you don't want to use iTMS music or an iPod, then just don't use those features.
That being said, hopefully SongBird will have some great innovations that'll push other software makers ahead as well... I'm just not sure there's any more to it than "we don't have DRM and you can see our sourcecode - yay!" and if the developers stick with that mindset it'll never go anywhere.
Only on slashdot can iTunes be equalled to Windows Media Player...
OK, here we go...
Get your facts straight:
A very good idea.
files encoded from your own CDs do NOT have any DRM in them. Only tunes bought from the built-in on-line music store have DRM.
True.
iTunes is a player/ripped/jukebox/music store program.
Windows Media Player is a player/ripper/jukebox/music store program.
You DO NOT NEED to buy DRM tunes online, you do not even need an internet connection (although it comes in handy for the CDDB feature when ripping your own CDs).
Also true of Windows Media Player. Like iTunes, Windows Media Player 10 will rip your CD's to mp3, with no DRM.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
Here's a list of sites that sell DRM-free music by independent artists:
UseFree.org/drm
Songbird works with most if not all of these sites, and thus makes it easier than ever to break our dependency on RIAA's music and the cancerous DRM technology that it is pushing.
Get computers and accessories from Linux-friendly manufacturers
It's actually a pretty significant milestone for Mozilla because Songbird (AFAIK) is the first major product released that is built on the XULRunner platform.
XULRunner is exactly what it sounds like -- a small runtime to allow deployment of XUL-based applications on machines that may not have Firefox installed. Think of it as a JRE for XUL.
Until XULRunner, there was no practical way to build full-fledged apps using Mozilla tech that didn't run inside one of their products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Seamonkey) because that was the only way to get access to a XUL interpreter. Songbird is an interesting demo of how XULRunner gets you beyond that.
Read my blog.