Songbird for OS X coming soon

Oh, and XUL is a sloppy mess.

The old days? Sorry Charlie, but you need to step outside of the open source community for a few seconds. The fact of the matter is that the majority of consumers want products that let them do what they want to do, easily. As such, "synergetic" products are the growth edge of product development, and not just in the software community. Swiss Army Knife-type products, like Songbird, don't and won't attract most consumers. Period. Why download a bloated, slow, confusing product that makes me shop for my music, when I can download iTunes and buy almost any music I want at better quality than any other online music service out there? You can call it choice if you want, but most consumers have neither the time nor the interest to comparison shop for a song. Especially not when there's an easier (and significantly better) alternative out there.

Songbird happens to be a song by Oasis on their album Heathen Chemistry ;)

comment 6 :

there are MANY itunes-like software for YEARS. for example Rythmbox, Amarok or Banshee.
none got one tiny inch of problems with apple legals. there are clearly NOT "itunes" branded.

songbird will not be "alone". it will coupled with some services.

and still, before "songbird" fly we have time. it's only beta for now.

I do not believe millions of people will forget itunes for it. but it can be useful for MANY people.

ALERT -- There is no delivery date specified in the blog post. Scott, please fix your blog entry.

Thanks for your interest everybody.

"it is basically Firefox with a number of music playback features"

The way I think about Songbird is as "a media player that can access lots of media services".

Napster only connects to the Napster service. iTunes only connects to the iTunes Music Store. That's like the old days of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy which had software tied to their service.

Songbird is the Mosaic of media players -- we want it to connect to any media service in the world.

Before the rumors get out of control, we're not looking to make the mac version available sometime this week, but soon. On the horizon, if you are a developer, we will be making our source control public for those who like to DIY...

Can you even use music from other music stores on a Mac? Don't most require Windows Media Player 10?

It'll be worth looking at to see some different thoughts behind a music player, but currently it just looks like it's iTunes 4.0 with a black interface instead of brushed metal.

i believe that background made by a guy named mike matas who is a designer first for delicious and now apple, i think he has the backgrounds available at mikematas.com

jr

I tried the windows version.. wasn't too impressed with it. It does everything that iTunes does, with the addition of access to various music stores, which I'll never use.

The only thing that would make it a good option would be some sort of video deal.. but I have a modded xbox, sooo...