34 Comments

1. Evan Nov 22, 2005 5:44 pm Permalink

   Wow, Songbird is looking incredibly slick. Can’t wait to get my hands on it and give it a try.

2. Brian Benzinger Nov 22, 2005 10:46 pm Permalink

   This is definitely looking really nice. Keep up the great work. The UI and “VisDe” looks great Excited to fly this thing… get it? Fly. K.

3. Martin S. Nov 23, 2005 4:58 am Permalink

   Songbird looks like a serious competitor to J.River Media Center which is my player of choice.

   Please – do develop an audioscrobbler plugin too!

4. roblord Nov 23, 2005 12:09 pm Permalink

   We love Audioscrobbler/Last.fm too. We’re on it. =)

   FYI, Songbird is built atop the Mozilla platform, so it will be cross-platform and unprecedently open to extensions, just like Firefox.

5. Jérôme Nov 24, 2005 8:30 am Permalink

   Wow, Songbird is looking incredibly iTunes . But I will certainly give it a try, too.

6. Jammin Nov 24, 2005 9:34 am Permalink

   You got some screwey GUI design on your main top bar, the buttons are butt ugly… drop me a line if you need help.

   Good luck with the project

7. Chris Cunningham Nov 24, 2005 11:04 am Permalink

   That non-native skin is going to be optional, right? Of all the things the world (and especially the free software community) doesn’t need any more of, non-native skinned media players are head and shoulders above the competition.

   – Chris

8. Louis C. Nov 24, 2005 11:55 am Permalink

   As long as there’ll be a linux version, I’m happy

9. perko Nov 24, 2005 6:43 pm Permalink

   will the source be public such that RPMs would be avilable for Linux?

10. Anonymous Nov 24, 2005 8:13 pm Permalink

    Looks like a complete iTunes knockoff UI-wise

11. John Nov 24, 2005 8:52 pm Permalink

    I really like the look of the interface. Looking forward to a preview release.

12. Anonymous Nov 24, 2005 10:50 pm Permalink

    Ouch.

    If you’re going to rip off the user interface of a major media player, try not to make it look like a *cheap* knock-off.

13. roblord Nov 25, 2005 1:02 am Permalink

    See Songbird vs iTunes?.

14. roblord Nov 25, 2005 1:10 am Permalink

    Yes, we’ll have a Linux and Mac OS X builds early 2006.

    For the Songbird User Preview release in December we’re targeting Windows in a few languages.

    Nearly all our code is cross-platform XPCOM and XUL, the same as Firefox. =)

15. Anonymous Nov 25, 2005 1:16 am Permalink

    Songird’s feathers are 100% Mozilla XUL, so Songbird may be refeathered at will in CSS, just like a Web page.

    Check JKoshi‘s Songbird design post.

16. David Naylor Nov 25, 2005 1:17 am Permalink

    Hmm. Actually, I would really like another non-native skinned media player. I’ve been trying to find a real alternative to winamp for ages, but without any success.

    This is sounding good.

17. themaxx.ca Nov 25, 2005 1:37 am Permalink

    Will it be Open-Source? I can’t find it mentioned anywhere…

18. Amihai Nov 25, 2005 7:34 am Permalink

    Any chance I can play pandora.com stations in there?
    Because if I can, no player in the world would be able to beat and extensible iTunes like media player.

19. Anonymous Nov 26, 2005 9:24 am Permalink

    I really like how this thing is, but what I don’t like is a) the windows feel of it, and b) the lack of necessity for another music player for Linux, now with Amarok and Rythmbox and XMMS and Banshee and BeepMediaPlayer….

    Well, it is a really cool design, though and I really love the way it’s coded in the background (being a web designer myself in my spare time), which’ll also probably mean that it could run as well on Gnome as KDE, which is neat, as long as you can make the thing integrate like a gnome app.

    It’s certainly a feat of UI design. When this is more complete, it’ll really show the world that open source programmers are better, when you can make a program that runs faster/better than a similar windows program.

20. Anonymous Nov 26, 2005 12:37 pm Permalink

    Does it support synchronization for other PAD devices like Nomad or iRiver?

    If so, is it as good as WMP in terms of autosyncing updated tags, etc? That’s the killer feature for me.

21. starwed Nov 27, 2005 7:40 pm Permalink

    Several people have asked whether this will be an open source project or not. So far, I haven’t seen an answer. Because it’s being built upon the mozilla platform, which is free software, you run the risk of a backlash of opionion if it turns out this is closed source. Being upfront and answering questions about licensing now is probably a good idea. (Even if you haven’t decided yet, say so! ^_^)

22. f. Nov 27, 2005 11:40 pm Permalink

    On your screenshots we don’t see any cover pictures.

    I really hope album cover picture from mp3 tags will be featured Like iTunes.

23. Aaron Nov 28, 2005 6:52 am Permalink

    I’ve been wanting to ditch iTunes for quite a while, but there’s never been a different worthwhile player for Mac.

    Just promise me one thing — that it can sync with a directory on my hard drive and automatically add files when I add files to the directory and automatically remove files when I delete them (exactly like MusikCube). There’s my one request. As long as it has that, I’m happy.

    Of course, you could also add MOD support and I’d be even happier. But that might be asking a bit much

24. Anonymous Nov 28, 2005 6:26 pm Permalink

    It doesn’t matter how you dress it up… it is still an iTunes rip off. Maybe your should put your efforts into having an original idea instead of explaining your fraud with bullshit.

25. Tracey Nov 29, 2005 4:46 am Permalink

    Contribute your _own_ application and code something thats original. I’m always confused on how some people complain and troll about some app when they haven’t invested the energy or the time into writing one themselves. Programming is about solving problems, coming up with solutions. Where is yours?

26. g Nov 29, 2005 9:34 am Permalink

    I would truly love if this worked as a front end for the slimserver applicaton (slimdevices.com)

    g

27. Neura Nov 29, 2005 2:52 pm Permalink

    I’m guessing this person will never read your reply… though I’d LOVE to read theirs!

28. David Nov 29, 2005 11:36 pm Permalink

    I know tags are so very Web 2.0, but I really really want them in my music library (and not everywhere else). ID tags are OK, but don’t let you add arbitrary data. For example, I want to be able to mark the mood of my songs and create playlists off a filter like that. Unfortunately, ID tags fall on their face if I want to do something like that. I suppose I can hijack the comment field, but having that supported at a higher level (even if it just does tweak the comment field) would be most awesome.

    While I’m at it, I’ll request that we get smarter “auto playlists”. I want an “auto playlist” that is basically just a filter that I can tune on a song-by-song basis. So, say I create an auto playlist for all songs by a certain artist. Then, I want to add 2 songs from some other artist to that playlist and exclude a few songs by the original artist, yet still keep the filter on for new songs added to the library. Think of it like Gmail filters + labels. T’would be sweet.

29. Anonymous Dec 4, 2005 9:52 am Permalink

    “Wow, Songbird is looking incredibly slick. Can’t wait to get my hands on it and give it a try.”

    Wow, Songbird looks more than a little like iTunes. I wonder when you’ll be hearing from Apple’s legal team!

30. Anonymous Dec 4, 2005 11:13 am Permalink

    Looking great would hope that different colour schemes are available though I don’t like that black. A native look would be nicer. Looks a lot like itunes.. maybe a little too much like itunes. Can’t wait to try it out though!

31. pil Dec 5, 2005 11:06 am Permalink

    First of all, yes they all have similar UI’s but not the same. This is a direct rip-off, there is no way around it…

32. Brad J Dec 8, 2005 4:15 pm Permalink

    Who cares what it looks like – as long as its released for Linux i dont care. We dont have any visually attractive looking media players on Linux unfortunately – so the slick interface looks good. As well – you might want to introduce a launch-skin with the “Crystal VGA” icon theme by Everaldo http://www.everaldo.com/. Thanks for your work – i’m bookmarking this…

33. Scotty Dec 23, 2005 12:09 pm Permalink

    I really want to play around with this, I’m a big fan of iTunes, and loved WinAmp when I was on a peecee, though I thoroughly prefer iTunes, hopefully there will be some prettier skins, but the functionality looks sweet, I’m stoked to see/try it out for mac.

34. graig smith Mar 12, 2009 4:48 pm Permalink

    looks too much like itunes. the main reason i would like to switch away from itunes is that it doesn’t use standard windows interfaces. apple’s gui looks like it’s from the 1990′s. and i really don’t want it on my smooth and nice looking vista system. apples system is nice looking, but not when it’s mixed in with the vista look. i want uniformity, stability, support, and speed.