Dave Haynes

About two weeks ago i discovered Songbird, purely by chance, whilst reading a post over at Techcrunch reviewing the launch of v0.3 of this desktop media player. It was a truly Eureka moment. Like the first time i heard about Firefox, or when i laid hands on my brand new Nokia N95, this was something that converged parts of my world that had before remained separate. Unwittingly i had actually discovered the power of the Songbird technology just a week before that when downloading the Emusic Remote software that i now use in conjunction with my Emusic subscription.

So what is Songbird you ask… let me explain. Much quoted in fairly geeky circles to be the latest iTunes killer, Songbird is an open source desktop media player. That might sound a little boring but the implications are huge. Most of us have at one point or other used iTunes, either to organise and play our music, but also to go online and browse the iTunes Music Store. Now imagine all the power of iTunes but then open up the browsing to an infinite number of music stores, blogs and the whole media-rich world wide web.

To put it simply imagine a hybrid of Firefox and iTunes. Add an open source community busily building themes, extensions and other powerful tools for Songbird and what you have is a powerful combination. I’m extremely excited about it and will be telling anyone who will listen about the potential of Songbird.

Cleverly the Songbird software offers full support to play music bought from the iTunes Music Store, will import your iTunes library and an extension is available to support your iPod. What impressed me further still is that all my DRMed WMA files downloaded via my Napster-To-Go subscription also played in Songbird. It also offers support for most of the other well-know music formats out there making this a truly universal player. Initially supported formats include MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, FLAC and others.

As well as being a good media player, Songbird truly offers the full potential of the world wide web allowing you to browse to any website just as you would in Internet Explore or Mozilla Firefox, but adds a media-rich experience and additional functionality that is already being harnessed by sites such as The Hype Machine, Insound and SkreemR. If audio files are embedded in the site, they will be displayed separately and can be played, downloaded, included in playlists. I think this will be just the start of a very long list of websites that recognise and harness the full power of Songbird and I expect more innovative possibilities are on their way

The project is still in development however and there are some features that are still very much missing but hopefully shouldn’t be too far in the future. Firstly, there is no support for playback, ripping and burning to CD’s. A quick browse through the Songbird forums suggest that this is a recognised problem and that a solution is ‘coming soon’. They’ll need to fix this before anyone could seriously considering Songbird as an ‘iTunes killer’. A lesser problem, but one that will be a serious sticking point for people like me, is that the current version of Songbird offers no support for scrobbling to my Last.fm account. If you don’t know what scrobbling is then you have nothing to fear, but for those who do its a disappointment that it’s not availabe. The good news is that a scrobbling add-on was available for Songbird 0.2 so its difficult to imagine that an update for the current 0.3 version is far behind. It’s important to note as well that Songbird is still very much in development stage and i think we can expect all these areas to be covered by the time a full launch is underway.

Interestingly, as I mentioned at the start of this post, i think i had actually experienced Songbird a couple of weeks prior to discovering it without even realising. Having a passion to try out new services i decided to download an audiobook by upgrading my existing Emusic subscription. In doing so i was forced to download the Emusic Remote client. Initially I did this begrudgingly as i don’t like downloading unnecessary software. My first experience wasn’t great, it seemed like an unecessary step to simply download an audiobook. In reflection, i completely get it and congratulations to Emusic for being the first major music download store to embrace this technology. I don’t think they will be the last!

Keep your eyes fixed to Bytesize Music for Songbird updates as and when they come in, i’m sure i’ll have plenty to say about it in the coming weeks and months. And if you see me wearing a Songbird t-shirt with a glint in my eye then you might want to stay away unless you want a 30 minute conversation about it!!! Props to the Songbird team, I hope it realises its full potential.