Songbird powers label-approved P2P download service Qtrax

Brian Dillard, Monday, January 28, 2008 @ 10:35 am

Last week I posted my interview with Stephen Lau, developer evangelist for the Songbird open-source music player. Afterward, I had some follow-up questions, which appear at the bottom of this post.

During my conversation with Lau, he tipped me off to the imminent launch of a new music service that would be white-labelling the Songbird core. The accouncement came this weekend from new peer-to-peer download service Qtrax, which promises major label-approved P2P access to a music catalog of 25 million tracks. The Wired News report on Qtrax provides plenty of interesting background information. But now UK newspaper the Guardian is reporting that Qtrax's music-label support is far from final.

As the music labels continue their quest to usurp the iTunes monopoly, it seems like Qtrax would have as much leverage as any other alternative distribution channel. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. In the meantime, here are our follow-up questions to the original interview with Stephen Lau

Agile Ajax: Can you give me some examples of current Songbird licensees? I'm assuming that eMusic Remote, the eMusic media player/download manager, is based on Songbird, correct? Who else?

Stephen Lau: Actually the eMusic Remote app is another XULRunner app, not actually derived from Songbird. I'm afraid our current licensing terms don't allow us to reveal who has licensed Songbird. But if you watch for a new music service announcement coming up soon (imminently, in fact), you'll see one.

Agile Ajax: I never realized so many big projects were using XULRunner. Does Songbird owner Pioneers of the Inevitable have ties to any of the Joost or Miro folks? What's the wider XULRunner community like - not just the Mozilla folks, but the other organizations that are building atop XULRunner?

Stephen Lau: We don't have any formal business ties or anything; there are the usual types of support groups that spring up when anyone is using a large framework like XULRunner, though: IRC (irc.mozilla.org, #xulrunner), forums/mailing lists and local user groups.

Agile Ajax: Can you clarify the media-core issue? I guess I had gotten the impression in other published interviews that VLC was the media core, but it sounds like that's not the case. Is VLC being used at all anymore, or are you still in the process of phasing it out for GStreamer?

Stephen Lau: We currently still use VLC on Mac and Windows, while GStreamer is used on Linux. Our plan is to move to using GStreamer on all platforms just to standardise on one default media core. But given the modular nature of our framework, we'll probably still continue to have plugins to interface to our currently supported VLC, Windows Media Player, and Quicktime media cores - and who knows what might come up in the future? We've found different people (and different partners/licensees) prefer using different cores, so it's in our best interests to keep this sort of stuff modular in nature.

agile ajax

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