Software Update: Songbird 0.1

Songbird is an open source and cross platform music player that uses Mozillas XULRunner and VLC, and can play mp3, wma, aac, ogg and flac files, among others. The player is being developed with the idea of ​​offering a counterweight to programs such as Apple iTunes and Windows Media Player. Songbird is able to run not only music files, local playlists and music databases, but also play music files, playlists and music databases located anywhere on the web. In addition, the functionality of Songbird can be expanded using extensions. An overview of all current and expected features can be found here this page.

The developers – led by Rob Lord, one of the first employees of Nullsoft (the makers of Winamp) and co-founder of Internet Underground Music Archive – of Songbird recently released the first preview version of the player. This version stands here parked and is only available for the Windows platform. Initial Linux and Mac OS X implementations are planned for the next Songbird release. Additional information about this release and about Songbird itself can be found in this interview. For now, we have to make do with the Windows variant, which has the following release notes entails:

This release is not intended to replace your current desktop media player… yet.

This release represents our first steps upon the path to a truly next generation media player. It is meant to give users a firm idea of ​​the direction we are heading, but we would be the first to admit we are far from there with our 0.1 build. And we wouldn’t want to claim to be.

Our tiny amount of C++ code is included in the build, but a working public build system is still in the rapidly approaching future. We would ask people interested in Songbird development to have a bit more patience until we’re ready for them.

However, we want to invite you all to import your media into our player, let it scan your metadata, and explore the (admittedly hardcoded at the moment) integration of a web browser into a media player. We equally invite you to browse web pages containing links to media content, and explore the integration of a media player into a web browser.

We have tons of links to let you have an idea of ​​the breadth of what we’re intending, but we assure you that they won’t be hardcoded like that once we’re further along. There will be an easy process to install any services you like and uninstall any services that annoy you.

In addition, there are certainly some known issues you all should be aware of, the worst of which being a pair of crash bugs and the fact that the browser part of the application wants to use RAM like a browser and not a media player.

Lastly, our metadata scanning is currently hacked in through VLC, and that approach is somewhat CPU intensive and further leaks some of the RAM it sends back to the app. So if you have a huge media collection on a slow machine, you might want to let the app be while it says it is “Scanning…” or you can click on that text to pause and resume the metadata scan while you play with our proof of concept. Modern machines should be just fine.

But take a deep breath, remind yourself it’s just a 0.1, and take a long hard look in the direction we’re pointing. We assure you, this is just the beginning.[break]The library screen of Songbird 0.1