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POTI, Creators of the Songbird Media Player, Call It Quits
ilikenwf writes "Pioneers of the Inevitable has announced on their blog that they will be folding on June 28. Started in 2007, the company went on to create the Songbird Desktop and mobile players, as well as the Songbird.me Facebook app. Their legacy lives on in Nightingale, an open source fork of the Songbird Desktop player that runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. No word yet on whether or not their currently closed source code will be opened up or not, but their contributions to the world of open source software are appreciated, and won't be forgotten."
since I first tested Songbird, I never felt that this would be able to become a success. It may have incorporated some interesting idea, but basing a media player on a heavyweight application such as Mozilla was a weird decision to start with. A media player should be fast, snappy and responsive, not take a minute to start.
I guess this was inevitable.
I never understood how they were going to monetize that. There were enough players that were good enough and free that I didn't see the point.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Spotify ...
Pandora
iTunes
pick one.
Click Here to download the latest source code.
Bit saddened about the demise of Songbird. It seems I'm one of the few people who not only liked using it but loved the fact that one could write extensions using the familar XUL stuff. ( i.e., If you know how to write Firefox extensions, you know how to write Songbird extensions - and all you need to know is JS, CSS and a bit of XML )
I think their initial idea was good, even laudable - build an open source media player and make it easy to write plugins. I guess they wanted to have an extension ecosystem just like Firefox's ( which arguably is the richest in the world amongst browsers )
I think it failed not because most people who want to listen to music aren't techies and they're happy ( and I'm talking about people using MS Windows on their computers ) with Windows Media Player , winamp or whatever else cool kids are using to play music these days ( I consider both Zune and iTunes to be way more bloated than needed )
I guess OSX users never typically use anything other than iTunes ( I myself didn't for the 4 years that I used OSX as my primary OS )and linux users went with Amarok ( good) or Rythmbox ( not so good) . I personally like the audacious music player.
There was no space left for Songbird - to distinguish itself - I wish it had been bundled with more linux distros. It used to do a good job at syncing Android phones - I wish more manufacturers had bundled it along with their 'phone software' ( I'm looking at you Samsung Kies, you abomination!)
RIP, Songbird.
but their contributions to the world of open source software are appreciated, and won't be forgotten.
While I appreciate a contribution to the opensource, to remember something one needs to know about it first.
~$ sudo apt-get install songbird
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package songbird
(translation: debian/ubuntu has nothing to remember).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/04/04/1244244/songbird-drops-linux-support Surprised it lasted a few more years.
It lacks facebook integration but that's not a major draw back.
If you considered it to be a major drawback, out of shear utter despair, I would commit seppuku with a butter knife.
The fact that you even mentioned makes me glad that I am middle aged and I don't have too many decades ahead of me.
I have to thank you in that I don't fear death anymore and the thought of my eventual demise gives me a great sense of peace.
I just started using Songbird a few days ago, so they HAD to fold now.
The world didn't need another monolithic music player. We already have Rhythmbox, which works fine, and Banshee, if you really want to maximize the bloat by including mono. Songbird offered nothing not already in both of these programs. It has no reason to exist.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pioneers of the Inevitable: Irony Much?
See, I've already forgotten them. I tried Songbird long ago...didn't do much for me.
When the first iteration of Songbird arrived, I wanted to see it succeed. Something open source, cross platform, with XUL/Mozilla style addons seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately, Songbird seemed to fall short in many areas.
For instance, it was rarely updated and lacked features such as iPod/iPhone sync etc.. that caused many to turn away. It was unfortunate that it didn't say... implement gtkPod etc.. and other facets of FOSS "media jukebox" style players that would have enabled it to provide a better featureset. As others have said, it just didn't do any particular thing "well enough" to distinguish itself, but moreover it fell down on the job in many areas and seemed to lose direction. It started to drift away towards pushing the "SOCIAL SOCIAL SOCIAL" aspect , then fixated on Android, became a semi-proprietary Last.FM clone etc... all without doing coming to a level of competency in a number of core features that made it noteworthy; it just seemed erratic. The "on again, off again" relationship with Linux is a prime example. First they were going to develop/build it for Linux, then it lagged behind, then they basically ignored it and eventually said they weren't going to bother, leading to the creation of the Nightingale fork, then coming back to Linux again with 2.0 etc... Nightingale has come into its own but still languishes behind other FOSS media players in many features; its a pity they were not supported properly from the beginning.
I'm sad to see what could have been a promising project fall short, but it really lacked direction (switching to all the "social, proprietary" nonsense was a great indicator ) and simply someone to come out and say "Can we at least offer a baseline of what Amarok/Banshee/Rhythmbox/Clementine/Miro etc.. does and after we do that, where do we distinguish ourselves?. Thankfully, there are other FOSS media players out there that have made more progress and shine at what they do.
was Inevitable.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
"... their contributions to the world of open source ... won't be forgotten."
Quite right. Pretty hard to forget something you never even knew existed.
I've been involved in the "cutting edge" of the software industry for many years, but I don't recall ever even hearing of Songbird before.
I'm big on cross plaform, and listen to music on Mac and Linux on a regular basis. Never heard of Songbird. Their lack of self promotion and word of mouth may have been a factor here.
Just wanted to clarify a couple of things. The Songbird SVN has been down for some months now, but they did put up the link mentioned in the comments above fairly recently.
As for Nightingale, we're still staying around even though we're not perfect yet, we have a handfull of devs still owrking on things - right now we're working or way to using a modern xulrunner instead of 1.9, which is what Songbird and Nightingale have used up until now. We're also going to ask POTI if we could get the source code to their closed source addons, such as MTP and DLNA support, and for the source to their addons platform with it's database, and the source to the mobile versions. We're game to maintain and improve upon all they offered, it's just going to be interesting to see how they respond.
http://mp3blaster.sourceforge.net/
http://cmus.sourceforge.net/
for those *nix users complaining of media players like Songbird being too bloated, the two players above should completely solve your problem and raise your leet cred.
I could just shrug my shoulders and boogie on outta here.
it does just about everything else
I stopped using it awhile back for a few reasons: 1) They killed off the Linux version instead of the OS X version, despite having a larger market share from Linux AND getting 2-3x as much contributed code-wise from Linux as opposed to Mac. Normally I am fully understanding of catering to the larger user base, but this seemed like a bad idea. 2) They dropped iPod device support after version 1.3. Seriously if I wanted to continue using it as an iTunes alternative, which they were pitching it as, I had to be able to manage my music with it as well. Signing up to support Zune was an idiotic idea, but they could have at least released the source code to let someone fork the add-on. I guess it really comes down to great idea, (usually) bad execution.
I was going to switch to Songbird on OS X a few years back so i could get away from iTunes, but it didn't even support playback from audio CDs...?
(and it still doesn't)
I liked the concept of Songbird, even though it was too 'heavy' a program, what with all the Mozilla stuff in the background. I really was looking for a replacement to Winamp, but Songbird didn't work. The problem was that it was painfully slow to parse the media library from my SMB share (Winamp was about 10 times faster), and that was just a show-stopper for me (I'm a music enthusiast, and play a little bit myself, so I have a rather huge library). So I went back to Winamp, and would check Songbird twice a year or so to check their progress.
Then about a year ago I found out about Foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/ and I never fired Winamp up ever again (as soon as I figured how to setup foobar). It's got all the geeky plugins ('components') I need, such as Kernel Streaming, AudioScrobbler and live Lyrics. The only downside is that it runs only under Windows.
I mean nobody listens to music on the desktop, haven't for years. Could be a great little Phone app though.
Although don't be idiots and try to make an iOS music app. I mean really you think you can do better then iTunes on iPhone/iPod, the company that invented the modern music player.
Android has no decent music app, even Google's own Play Music. Part of the problem is that there is no uniform structure to music on Android, so everybody just dumps music all over the device and tries to associate them randomly to artwork and gracenote tags, etc. Its a mess. If Google even just tried to associated your music to artwork and information automatically then it wouldn't be half bad, but I am tired of seeing a bunch of generic icons and poorly named songs on my Android which is why I don't use it as a music player.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.