A group of developers calling themselves Pioneers of the Inevitable has launched an early beta of a multiplatform web based music player and browser called Songbird. Some members of the groups had worked previously on Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. The current release is version 0.2 and is available for OS-X, Linux and Windows XP. I downloaded the current release onto my MacBook and when launched Songbird offered to import my iTunes library which it did quite successfully. It also included a number of extensions for Shoutcast and WikiPedia ( a strange one ). The code appears to be based on the Mozilla/Gecko engine and the group pays homage to the Mozilla Foundation. The user interface seems out of place on the Mac with its darkened theme and black windows but is otherwise very "pretty".
Because Songbird is based on the same code that is Firefox and Thunderbird it also inherits and extension mechanism which perhaps makes this the most useful feature.
Already third party developers have written some early extensions.
- Qloud Tagging & Search
- Windjay
- eMusic Integration
- iTunes Importer
- iPod Device
- Artist Tracker
- Library File Organizer
- Audioscrobbler Notifier
- Wikipedia Artist Display
- Shoutcast Radio Directory
- Minimize-to-Systemtray
Adding an extension to Songbird is similar to the mechanism used for Thunderbird and Firefox; download and XPI and import into the application. I imported the iPod Device extension which as once can guess allows the user to play and synchronise an iPod with Songbird. However, doing this WILL overwrite any data currently on the iPod.
This is indeed an exciting development and it will interesting to see how well this application is adopted. Given the success of Firefox and Thunderbird one may expect success. Read at longer review over at MacUser.
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