Came home after a long day, checked my mail and was delighted to find that Songbird 1.0 had shipped. I’d been waiting for it for a while. You may remember I’d blogged about it two years ago. In between I’d been following the blog, checked out some intermediate versions but felt I could wait.
So today I read the notes and the licences, downloaded it and played around with it. And you know something? It was worth the wait.
- An opensource music player.
- Platform agnostic: Linux, Mac, Windows.
- Format agnostic: MP3, FLAC, Vorbis on all; WMA, WMA DRM on Windows; AAC, Fairplay on Windows, Mac.
- Integrated web browser
- Scrobbles from last.fm
- Provides a decent mashup of band/artist details
- Community-based extensions and ecosystem
- Good bunch of add-ons already, covering lyrics and album art amongst others
- Tagging/folksonomy support
The device support, while rudimentary, looks promising. There’s no CD rip service as yet, and video is still some way off. I’ve taken a quick look at the licensing, and on the surface there doesn’t seem to be anything objectionable. Installation was a doddle. Importing music was even more of a doddle.
It’s still early days yet, but on the face of it, this is typically the kind of start I would want to see from an opensource music player, particularly one that is destined to evolve with and around community contribution and ecosystem development.
If there was one thing I would want quickly, it would be a variant of TwittyTunes. Explicitly for Songbird.
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