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Topic Archive: Songbird

Songbird 0.6rc2: Finally, editable metadata!

Brian Dillard, Monday, June 2, 2008 @ 11:13 am

Songbird, the Mozilla-based, web-enabled media player and mash-up tool, grows ever closer to its 0.6 release. Version 0.6rc2 went out over the weekend, and it's packed with goodies. Of particular interest to yours truly, 0.6 includes improved performance for large media libraries and a spiffy new metadata editor that actually writes back to the individual music files. Until now, the absence of these features has kept me from adopting Songbird as my day-to-day media player; I'm now anxious to see whether Songbird can become, for me at least, an iTunes killer.

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If you, too, are interested in the latest Songbird 0.6 release candidate, you can read the overview, download the executable or peruse our previous coverage of the project.

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Songbird 0.5 gets its first release candidate

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 @ 2:55 pm

Songbird 0.5

The first release candidate for Songbird 0.5 is now available for download. Songbird, as you may remember is the open-source, Mozilla-based media player/web browser we've been enthused about for the past several months. There are lots of bug-fixes and API changes this time around, but the big news from a UI standpoint is the debut of "Media Pages," which are extensions that rewire the main music-browsing interface using HTML or XUL.

As the Songbird website puts it:

As of this writing, Songbird ships with two default views: a simple traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view incorporating three filter panes across the top for choosing a subset of your music.  Views can be extended via extensions that implement Media Pages.  Developers can easily create new views as HTML pages or XUL pages which provide custom visual interfaces to Songbird libraries, and playlists.

Developers looking to play with Songbird 0.5rc1 will find the following resources useful:

The Songbird team is targeting a final release of 0.5 later this month.

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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

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Interview: Songbird developer evangelist Stephen Lau

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, January 22, 2008 @ 10:57 am

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After my enthusiastic support for the open-source Songbird media browser, I recently got the chance to sit down (virtually) with Stephen Lau, Songbird's developer evangelist. Stephen was full of thorough, informative answers about Songbird's technical underpinnings, business model, development methodology and roadmap to version 1.0.

Agile Ajax: For software that's still pretty far from a polished, commercial 1.0 version, Songbird has attracted a devoted following and an active user base. How and why do you think that's happened?

Stephen Lau: We owe it all to our fans! The users that have adopted Songbird have definitely put up with some growing pains as we get closer to our consumer 1.0 release, but they've done so because they see the value in having a completely open platform as a media player. They are the type of users who are early adopters, music geeks, tech geeks, etc. and as near as we can tell, Songbird's following has grown via word of mouth (blogs, reviews, etc.) from our users.

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Coming soon: Songbird 0.4

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 @ 5:35 am

The Songbird team is working hard to push out a 0.4 release by the end of the year. This Mozilla-based media player still has long way to go before it'll be ready for prime time. But incremental improvements from one developer prerelease to the next keep me excited about the possibilities. Changes for 0.4 include the concept of display panes: "standard integration points to attach Songbird add-ons to." Songbird's XUL-based rendering engine allows plugin authors to completely rewire the application interface, but display panes simplify that process by dividing UI real estate into predefined zones. Plugin authors will still be able to build their own layouts, but in most cases they'll probably prefer to wire up the standard display panes; that's just usability 101.

When I first posted about Songbird a couple of months ago, I hoped that it would eventually become the player of choice for users with very large (100gb+) media collections - users like me. Trolling Bugzilla, I can see the database engineers are hard at work figuring out how to optimize performance for power users as well as typical users. One possible approach: tuning the SQLite search algorithms based on user profile and library size. After years of struggling with iTunes's terrible scalability problem, I'm eager for an alternative. Songbird's search functionality is still extremely slow compared to other, more mature applications. But I'm buoyed by the knowledge that Songbird's developer community includes folks who aren't interested exclusively in casual users with a few hundred (ore even a few thousand) tracks.

After my original post, commentators suggested I give Amarok and foobar2000 a shot. But given that the former is a Linux/Unix project and the latter is Windows-only, I remain unconvinced. Songbird may not emerge from the demoware stage for a while, but the possibility of an open-source, cross-platform media player still gets me excited.

In addition to scalability, I was looking forward to better tools for the construction of mixtape-style playlists. Voila, the Songbird Blogs bring news of the Now Playing add-on, which allows you to construct a playlist in the right sidebar display pane while keeping your library visible. Compared to the iTunes interface, in which it's impossible to view both a playlist and your media library at the same time, this is an awesome feature.

I've been chatting with Songbird's Stephen Lau about the project and hope to publish an interview with him to coincide with the 0.4 release. Watch this space.

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Songbird 0.3: Why aren’t Ajax folks more geeked about “the Firefox of media players”?

Brian Dillard, Thursday, November 1, 2007 @ 10:16 am

Songbird, the open-source, Mozilla-based media player, received its 0.3 "developer pre-release" on Oct. 30. The UI hasn't changed much since the 0.2.5 "developer preview," but things continue to evolve under the hood. Better yet, the documentation and demos keep getting better. Check out the developer center for information about using XUL to build add-ons or using the JavaScript API to integrate your webapp with Songbird's media player.

If you've yet to experience Songbird, a little background is in order. The project is run by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a Bay Area company founded by veterans of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. Building on Mozilla's XULRunner platform and the VLC media player, Songbird aims to unite a web browser, a media jukebox and an online media player into a skinnable, extensible, open-source application. At this stage, the app is a long way from challenging the likes of Windows Media Player, let alone iTunes. But as it grows, it promises to cultivate the same kind of fervent user and developer communities as Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects.

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I first became aware of Songbird via a Boing Boing post. I'm surprised it hasn't generated more noise in the various Ajax feeds and news sources. With all the excitement about specialized browsers and desktop webapps, from Mozilla Prism to Google Gears and Adobe AIR, it seems like Songbird would be earning a lot of buzz. Maybe I'm just not hanging out at the right water coolers.

As an Ajax developer and huge music nerd, I'm looking forward to playing with the JavaScript API. It promises seamless integration between webapps running in the Songbird browser and the media player itself. Imagine iTunes, but instead of a built-in browser that only supports the iTunes store, you've got a Firefox clone that plays well with music vendors, P2P networks, MP3 blogs and any other internet music resource. Visit a music mag, for instance, and see all of its featured downloads automatically show up as a playlist in the media player (as in the Hype Machine example above). Visit an online music store and experience an iTunes-esque purchase experience. Indie-music brands such as eMusic and the aforementioned Hype Machine have already gotten on board. To see Songbird's API in action, compare these sites in Firefox and Songbird.

Songbird's add-on ecosystem is cool, too, especially for long-time Firefox developers. They can adapt existing add-ons with just a few tweaks. (GreaseMonkey, for instance, has already been ported.) But Songbird's API allows for more radical innovation than Firefox's add-ons. Instead of simply adding context menus and pop-up dialogues, you can rewire the entire UI of the media player. One example on the developer site shows how to replace the single play/pause button with individual play, pause and stop buttons. That's a trivial example, but a telling one.

I'm already salivating about the cool stuff I'll be able to do with add-ons:

Tag-parsing madness

Imagine Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ported to XUL. Like a lot of people, I'm obsessive about my meta tags, and I can't wait to use JavaScript regexes to bend them to my will en masse. I'm also hoping that Songbird will record all of its meta data in the music files themselves instead of socking some of it away in the music library. With iTunes, if you decide to rebuild your library in another player - or even in a different iTunes installation - you lose things like star ratings and play counts. It's a real bummer.

Huge libraries

The flat XML database in iTunes scales horribly. Get above about 100 gigs of music and performance slows to a crawl. This problem has only gotten worse with the bloat of Cover Flow, Quicktime integration and all the other features I don't need. I have 450 gigs, most of it ripped from my huge CD collection, and I've had to separate it into four separate libraries (using Libra) just to get decent performance. That sort of defeats the whole "any song at any time" promise of the MP3 era. Enter SQL Lite, which is how Songbird stores its own media library. I've got high hopes that a relational-database back end coupled with open-source how-to will make Songbird the media player of choice for folks with enormous libraries.

Interface freedom

iTunes and its Smart Playlists are all about endless, automated mixes. But I'm an old-school mix-tape guy. At the end of each year, all of my friends usually get a four-CD retrospective of the year's best tracks as compiled by me. But with iTunes, it's excruciating to build a "source" list of possible tracks for these multi-disc epics, then slot the tracks into individual discs and experiment with sequence. You can only view one playlist at a time, so every time you decide to move a track from one playlist to another, it's a multi-step operation. Imagine an interface where I could see my "source" list and all of my target lists at once, and where drag-and-drop defaulted to a "move" operation rather than a "copy" operation. With XUL and JavaScript, I'll be able to build any specialized interface I want and swap it in for Songbird's default UI.

Sure, most of my needs are pretty specialized, but I hardly think they're unique. And that's the point of an extensible, open-source player. You're free to build the features YOU want to see and share them with others like you. That's a lot more productive than griping over at the iLounge forums about iTunes's shortcomings.

I know Songbird isn't the only open-source, component-based music player out there, but it is the only one that's drawing on the power of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has shown how disruptive the Mozilla community can be in the browser market, which, like the music-player market, is dominated by a single product. Songbird may not topple iTunes any sooner than Firefox topples IE, but it should provide a powerful alternative and perhaps put some competitive pressure on the folks in Cupertino. It was extremely shrewd of Pioneers of the Inevitable to hitch their wagon to Mozilla's. I'm definitely going along for the ride.

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