Hello Birders! It’s the new head bird of Songbird here. My name is Les Schmidt and I took over the top spot at Songbird earlier this year. Now that I’ve found my way around the nest a bit, I thought I’d take this occasion to share a little about the new Songbird that is emerging.
When I came to Songbird, I sat down with our investors, our partners, our employees and our new management team. I talked to people in the music and technology industries and explored many of the over 400 new digital music services that have debuted in the past several years.
After parsing through this enormous amount of input, our team concluded, as many of you probably have as well, that almost everything about the music industry is changing. Music and technology are rapidly innovating and new services are being introduced almost daily. It’s a significantly different world from the way things were when Songbird originally started. And it appears that changes aren’t destined to slow down any time soon. Here are some high-level trends that we distilled. We believe these should drive the focus of Songbird going forward:
- Increasingly, people are listening to music on connected devices (e.g. phones, tablets), not solely PCs
- People are warming up to the idea of using cloud-based services enabling access to their music anywhere (e.g. Google, Amazon, Apple and MP3Tunes)
- More people are subscribing to music streaming services (e.g. Pandora, Spotify, MOG and Rdio)
- Managing your music on the desktop is dominated by iTunes
- YouTube is one of the top locations younger people listen to music (57% according to Nielsen)
- Social music experiences are becoming more important especially as it relates to expressing music interests and understanding your friends’ interests.
The bottom line is that if Songbird continues to primarily focus on the desktop and the associated purchase-download-manage model, we will be increasingly out of sync with changing marketing conditions.
OK, so where should we fly next?
Well, we’ve spent the past few months creating a fundamentally new strategy for both the company and our products. We’re not ready to share all of the details yet, but I can certainly state that we are going to be working on smaller, more focused apps and directly targeting social music experiences for all of you – our “fans”.
We have a lot of ground to cover and we are trying to cover it as quickly as we can. Stay tuned to this blog. As we create the future of Songbird, we’ll be back at you with more news.
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52 Comments
SubscribeYes, but SOMEONE has to serve that non-social desktop user market, and as far as I know nobody else is with a cross platform open source skinnable awesome program, you were the last hope.
Thanks, this is the kind of news the enthusiast that follow these blog want and have been asking for. Hopefully the next update want take months (even if there is not much to say, it’s nice to hear something).
What’s next? Make a fast and stable release and then we talk. Not to mention the lack of support to non-DirectSound drivers.
Sorry, empty marketing talk is nothing people who followed your project through the past three years want to hear.
This project started as a Desktop Music player and file manager to surpass iTunes in functionality. Now you want to ditch this userbase (as you did with the Linux crowd) and create some sort of cloudy streamy social “something” before even getting the core functionality 100% right.
My advice is to just be open about which users you want to use your software and which you don’t want. You obviously don’t wan’t the old boring “purchase-download-manage” people anymore.
What Tier777 said.
Songbird was supposed to be everything the horrific iTunes wasn’t – a slick desktop music player that wasn’t a bloated piece of shit.
Now you make a blog post saying ‘we’ve decided to make a bloated piece of social networky, cloudy piece of shit’
I am so disappointed – Songbird could have been a contender.
songbird for mobile (android) is meh. in contrast, songbird on the desktop is a great product. for me, it’s far superior to itunes (easier-to-customize, light-weight, FLAC support, etc.)
but songbird on the desktop still needs some polishing here and there. podcast support, fixing the flac cover art metadata bug, visualizations, and supported linux builds, to name a few things.
imo, the original desktop is your core product. you already allocated some resources away from it (dropped linux support comes to mind) to develop songbird for mobile, a product that doesn’t stand out in the android market. i’m afraid that by dedicating more resources towards the development of new apps, you are hurting your core product. (i feel the development pace for songbird has slowed considerably already. where’s 1.10?)
^^^ scratch the last sentence. glad to see 1.10 is finally here. downloading now…
Does it mean dropping current Mozilla Framework ?
I’m helping manage and revitalize the Nightingale project at http://getnightingale.com
It’s a community fork of Songbird, as the drop of official (and x86_64) support for linux, as well as a general lack of development and updating in general has disappointed us, and we want to bring a good media player that’s open and free back to the masses.
I personally have an interest as I use linux and want a decent media player, however we plan to roll Mac and Windows builds too. Our current stable tree (nightingale-1.8) is working and builds fine on most common linux distros, and on Windows with msys compiles (although there are some caveats).
In the coming weeks, I along with others will be working on moving songbird 1.10 to Gecko 6+ and doing other changes, making it nightingale — and hopefully having a new generation of the once-great music player.
We’d love to have devs, skinners, and extension writers, as well as just fans and testers. Stop by the forums or join #nightingale on MozNet IRC.
@Matt,
That is the best news ever. Can’t wait to try Nightingale out on my Linux machine.
The android app needs to get more stable. On my Galaxy S2 it forgets the position within a track often. Esp. when using stopwatch, alarms or flight mode while a track is paused. Also, it doesn’t respect the global “disable screen rotation” option.
On the desktop, I would like to see full fledged podcast support. Esp. the a merge of MediaMonkey’s and Miro’s features.
But in any case: thanks for working on SongBird!
A big plus about Songbird for me is that it provides a way for me to combine streaming services, cloud-based services, and files on my hard drive all in one place simply by opening tabs for Pandora and Amazon and switching back and forth between them and the library. Now, if I could just use it as an RSS feed reader too that would be awesome.
Having just automatically upgraded to 1.10 and found that manage music is no longer available it is time to look for something else. As others here have said the reason I use songbird is because I do not buy into the whole social, cloud hype. Of course for you as a business I guess that is where the money is. So good luck with your future model, time for me to start using something else.
I came for the add-ons, but when those disappeared/stopped being developed, I stayed for the ease of use. I don’t want to switch to Foobar2000 or MediaMonkey, frankly because I don’t want to spend hours getting it to look and function exactly how I want.
That said, I am an Android owner, and it would be cool to stream my desktop music to my phone, perhaps even when I am not on the wifi network.
“Here are some high-level trends [...]”
Trends being the key word here… there is definitely still a market for traditional music enthusiasts such as myself. I could honestly care less about social music features, network synchronization, or any of those other services; I use Songbird because it has (had) a niche presence as a feature-rich, add-on supported (well, not so much anymore since most of the add-on developers abandoned SB after Linux support was *officially* dropped and the program started losing direction) alternative to WMP and iTunes.
If I were interested in a different approach, I would just use the Spotify, Grooveshark, or Pandora clients – Songbird would be the last thing on my mind. You will essentially be alienating your core users by abandoning the traditional music management platform and attempting to appeal to an entirely different audience who, to be honest, already has all of their bases covered.
I equate this decision to a car company that up and decides to abandon car production for making bicycles because being eco-friendly is a new “trend”, not realizing that perhaps making their cars more energy-efficient and affordable would be a better solution.
Also, you state that “managing your music on the desktop is dominated by iTunes”, but that is because iTunes is a finished, stable product. I know a great many people who I recommended Songbird to who would have happily converted if the program, but grew frustrated with the poor performance of Songbird and the fact that features kept being removed, moved, or delegated to an add-on that was quickly forgotten and left to die. These people quickly switched back to iTunes or WMP (which, sadly enough, is faster and more responsive than SB in most cases).
Just some thoughts from a long-time “fan” who feels like he is watching a good friend’s downward spiral.
Wow, 2 posts on the blog on a row, what a surprise. But allow me to prefer the first one than the second, as I totally share the remarks and bitterness of most of my fellow long-time fans above.
If really you are going to drop the current not built-in cloud based (although, as someone mentionned, cloud is there already with the integrated browser, that is a key differentiator of Songbird compared with the competition – look iTunes), why don’t you pick a brand new name and offer the “Songbird” name to the Nightingale community?
And again, I know the times have been tough for POTI more than once, but what was really missing lately is a dedicated community and marketing manager! All remaining employees did more than their best, but this could not replace truly dedicated positions -like Laura did a long time back.
Desktop Songbird is a poweful application, most of the performance flaws have been corrected by now, its openess, its integration with any USB devices and somehow with the web is something iTunes will never have. Is it really too late to bring the community and users back to it?
You are talking about YouTube and so one? Ok, yes that is true, when I want to discover a new musician I go there, but when I want to manage tens od thousands of podcasts and high quality FLAC files, the integration with YouTube is no use for me anymore. And that is where SB comes in the play.
So I really hope I misunderstood your post and that you won’t get rid of the core feature and platform of the desktop version of SB, but build more on it.
PS : Songbird on Android? Yes, nice move in parallel, but missing so many features and not really suited to tablets yet. The integration with desktop SB could be tighter (ranking, playlists,…)
PSS: yes, excellent podcast support is still the feature I miss the most.
I like the last part. I would love for this to be a real blog an nut just a press center for new releases. But I got to tell you: you should not trust the poles all that much.
I use this program mainly because:
-Winamp was ruined. Actually it was a long down spiral after the 2.0.
-I hate Apple more than any other brand in this world
-And well this is the only music player that actually dose what i want it to do and looks good in the process
Abut the “warming up to the idea of using cloud-based services”. Sorry but we are still not there. We all know y we are using online mail but it stops there. At this point in time that is.
“More people are subscribing to music streaming services”. Yeah.. sure.. keep telling you’re selves that
Music streaming ppl are a sort that i do not associate with. Like Porsche ppl but not sure if you will get the reference here.
Maybe if you set up you’re own survey. I’ll do it
iTunes has market share because they support iPhone and iPod Touches, not because people love iTunes. Nobody wants social integration in their music player, have you ever seen somebody use “Ping”?
One way or another, the desktop open music player area will be covered. So far none of them really can equal Songbird/Nightingale in quality and usefulness, including various open source ones…
Whether Songbird for desktop is scrapped or not, Nightingale will persist, even without me, because it’s needed. We’d love to have all of y’all stop by the forums and IRC and hang with us, and help us if you’re capable, and willing.
What the heck is wrong with you? Why did you stop Songbird to manage the Library? After you deleted the podcasts, this was the last feature no other player had! >.<
That's just rubbish. You turned Songbird into a boring and useless media managing software.
If the next update does not reactivate the managing, I'll be gone.
Awesome! I love exploring music so the direction you’ve described sounds exciting! My girlfriends share spiritual music that is truly awesome now on FB just by incorporating You Tube…so if it’s going to be more social that is exciting! Lyrics to songs would be cool to have, my kids watch You Tube and have to make up words…which could be dangerous!
Rock on Songibrd!!!
+1 with you on SquareWheel on the reason why iTunes is predominant (at least seen from the people around me in France). And also because of good podcast support (but this is a plus, the first reason being the need of iTunes to connect their iThings).
So, although I truly think that Songbird could be a good platform for the cloud and for discovery (via the embedded browser and various add-ons, it is already the case today), this new layer must be developped on top of a solid base that does excellent library and non-Apple devices management.
Stand on your feet firmly on the earth before you look up at the clouds, or you will fall
Just as a data point, what this particular fan wants is a fast, configurable, cross-platform program to play my locally stored song files (MP3, OGV, etc).
Right now I play those songs almost exclusively off my portable drive, attached to Windows 7 or Ubuntu desktops or notebooks. Eventually I’ll be adding a smartphone to the mix, I’m sure.
Your new plan looks like it’s going to move Songbird right along with the rest of the herd, making it less and less distinct. Yet another ‘social music space’ platform, that clumsily attempts to link video, streams, etc.
I hope I’m wrong. I look forward to hearing the actual strategy.
One of the most frustrating things about Songbird over the last couple of years has been the lack of transparency. We find out about major changes AFTER the fact, and have no input. It’s very hard to feel invested in a product when … well… one can’t invest.
Well, first of all, thanks for the update, it was sorely needed. But, I think I see why there wasn’t one for a long time. I have to add my voice to all the other posters, your vision for the future sounds like nothing I want. I think I get your problem, you’re never going to make money on a well functioning open source desktop client, especially now that mp3 players (and partnering options) are obviously headed to extinction. The problem is you don’t have content, and that’s the only thing that has any hope of getting people to shell out the bucks.
I could be wrong, I hope I am, there are a lot of incredible untapped potentials in Songbird I think, but if you don’t build on TOP of something like itunes, then I’m not sure how anything you said in your post is going to be different from just a web browser.
As someone who has been dipping his toes into the Songbird pool but has been unable to commit due to bugginess, a seeming lack of updates, bug fixes and regard for stability (maybe none of those are the case but the lack of communication and the lack of help from staffers sure point that way) I’ve got to tell you this post pushes me away. If the folks here wanted “trendy” there’s far easier ways to get it.
This animated .gif sums up my feelings towards this post:
http://4.asset.soup.io/asset/2310/4948_b3e6.gif
I was afraid of this. I was still hoping that Songbird will become a usable desktop media player and manager. But judging from this post it will never happen.
My needs are simple: dynamic (AKA smart) playlists filtered further by genre/artist/album connected with a now playing list. Support for rating, playcount, replaygain and gapeless playback is also needed. Songbird has all this but many areas still need improvements.
Currently I switched to MusicBee on Windows and I’m still looking for an alternative in Linux. On portable device I use my own player written in Qt/QML. I will probably modify it for desktop use when the desktop QML components are ready. It seems to me that the only chance for a good and open media player is to write one myself.
@jech
Thank you for sharing that application! From what I can tell already, Musicbee is everything Songbird should be at this point; there are so many settings and features!
For the time being, I will stick with Songbird, because I have invested a lot of time in it and I truly want it to succeed. Unfortunately, if the POTI fail to listen to what the users are saying and this new direction that Les Schmidt has announced above erodes the player significantly, I may have to switch to MB. Who knows, maybe in implementing these new ideas, the desktop player will get some much needed love, and the team will rethink removing the music management functionality and instead focus on improving Songbird as both a local and online player, rather than trying to change their game plan completely.
@Les Schmidt
Please rethink your team’s strategy. Your users are telling you what they want from your product – listen to them. I know that the market is changing and you need to keep current to make it, but do not abandon the last remaining solid “fan” base that you have in doing so. If money is that much of a problem, why not get the community involved? I would be more than happy to support this product financially with a donation or promotional purchase (I am not advocating making SB a paid product) if I knew that the team was going to listen to my input and . Here’s an idea: Get some musicians on board, see if you can sell “special edition” versions of the player with artist themes and an album or two (maybe even a full discography?!) as a promotional package. That may be a lot of work, but it seems like a lot better option than completely changing the product and alienating users…
Sorry, forgot to finish one of my sentences: “…if I knew the team was going to listen to my input and work towards creating a product that meets my needs as well as the teams.”
I’d like to echo a lot of the sentiments already expressed here. I first started using Songbird because I bought a Mac, and I can’t stand iTunes. I found that Songbird had some of the Winamp-style features I had been missing, and plug-ins to handle most of the rest of what wasn’t built-in. No other product seemed to have what I needed.
All I want is a media player that does a solid job categorizing my large library and lets me easily create song queues.
I consider myself reasonably cutting edge, and I really don’t think that any of your trends describe what I want, except for maybe “Social music experiences are becoming more important especially as it relates to expressing music interests and understanding your friends’ interests.” But I don’t really see how Songbird fits into this.
It’s already a bit disheartening how infrequently the desktop player gets updated, because there are still a lot of things that can be improved with it. If the development team really gives up on it, I’ll be forced to find something else.
Es lamentable escuchar que se unen a la moda de todo tiene que irse a la “nube” y echar todo lo que habían avanzado en poco más de año y medio, yo recomendaba Songbird era un reproductor de música con un futuro prometedor y sus carencias se podían solucionar con algún “addon”.
No entiendo porque primero no hacer un buen reproductor de música antes de añadir todas esas características en la nube, que son buenas sí, pero darles tanta prioridad a la nube será bueno para los “fans”.
Estoy de acuerdo con muchos de aquí que antes era más transparente (se entiende el cambio) y era fácil ver alguna característica que te gustaba, veías para cuando estaba planeada, uno mismo decía: “puedo esperar por eso” pero ahora. Si llega haber un cambio tan drástico creo que como dicen van a volver a empezar de nuevo en verdad ya que muchos se irán a otras alternativas.
It is unfortunate to hear that bind to the fashion of it all has to go to the “cloud” and take all they had advanced in just over a year and a half, I was recommended Songbird music player with a promising future and its shortcomings are could be solved with an “addon”.
First do not understand why not make a good music player before adding all those features in the cloud, which are good yes, but give much priority to the cloud will be good for the “fans”.
I agree with many here that used to be more transparent (it is understood the change) and it was easy to see any features that you liked, you saw the time was planned, self saying, “I can wait for that” but now. If you come to have such a drastic change as they say I will start over again in truth and many will go to other alternatives.
RIP Songbird. I probably should have been using Winamp all this time anyways.
Well, big surprise 32 comments, nearly all of them saying that at a high level the songbird team has completely missed the mark, not for the first time, and ignores the needs of the people that use their product. Response? None whatsoever.
How do you develop a successful business model? Do the opposite of this.
Just a +1. I’ve been hanging on to using Songbird hoping that eventually the features and functionality I want would gradually come. Another update, and all I see are bug fixes and a few more things I don’t want or need. Just installed Musicbee, and it’s more what I’m looking for: podcast support, displaying albums graphically in groups by artist (albumartist) and sorting them by year. And watch folders for multiple source
Songbird features I never wanted and don’t use:
CD ripping? That’s what EAC is for.
Tag editing? That’s what Mp3 tag (or Tag&Rename) is for.
Playing video? That’s what VLC is for.
Music downloads? Got Firefox for that.
Mac support? My house is an iCrap-free zone.
No Linux support? That’s one of my boxes bird-free already.
And now the bird apparently is off to marketing buzzword la-la-land: cloud, stream, social media, blah, blah, blah.
Looks like it’s “bye, bye birdie” for me.
If you were going to try and take some of the market of iTunes and its music management, perhaps one thing you should not have done is completely remove automatic file management entirely and replace it with a popup saying “it’s simplified!” I’ve seen CoD clones copy its competitor more accurately than this.
You’ve literally made your application harder to use with each iteration for the past three versions, and this is on Linux, mind you.
The moment I find an application capable of managing files with my current database, you guys are off my hard drives for good.
Fix. It. Now.
…and cue the crickets.
I know this backlash must be somewhat overwhelming, but take it as a sign of an involved/caring community. Talk to us. We are your friends and allies.
“high-level trends” ? I’m doing one…
I have been with Songbird since the beginning
.. I left after the recent update that appears to be a major step backwards. I stuck with it through all the false starts and mishaps after which we arrived at an ‘ok’ performing device … while during this time Steven Mayall seemed to have been working on what I would call a sister program. The result of his operation is a superb player that is perfect out of the box.
@topperch: I would like to suggest that you abandon this operation and just buy out MusicBee, because it is all that songbird should have become. But then again….Take care.
yeah, the last up date suxs seriously. All the add on’s I want to use I can’t use anymore. I use the desktop and the app. New Technology is seriously sucking all the fun out of music.
Again, Nightingale aims to right all the wrongs that SB has made once we have a stable product. While we focus on Linux, WE WILL have Windows and Mac builds once we get things working…
Please, stop by the forums and IRC and help out! http://getnightingale.com/forum
Guys, actually most of the addons will work quite perfectly once you remove the compatibility check.
- Open a browser tab in SB
- type in “about:config”
- add a new boolean parameter named “extensions.checkCompatibility.1.10″ and set it to No
That’s common knowledge, so, sorry if that’s too obvious
PS : and of course the same when a new version 1.11 shows up.. just name the boolean extensions.checkCompatibility.1.11
And again, Tagger replaces the Manage Music feature very well, even better, as it gives me more control over it (and Tagger works with the above tweak)
And, oh yes, 42 comments already in 2 weeks…
But still not the slightest reply or even acknowledgment from the author.
Please… Are you hearing us?
Please implement Cross-fade!! and update extensions!!!!
@DeST
Just FYI, many of the extensions for Songbird were maintained by third parties, independent developers, or motivated employees.
Most of the out-of-date extensions that you will see are open for adoption, as their developers likely got frustrated with the situation here, starting with the announcement that *official* linux support would be dropped, and moved on to another project.
Essentially, the Songbird team cannot *directly* be blamed for the lack of up-to-date extensions, though I can’t really say they have been fostering a community that would encourage developers to continue or pick back up with their work, to put it nicely.
I’m sad.
I’m sad because I’ve tested MusicBee, and it’s really impressive. It has everything Songbird is missing (it has even the same look&feel), as some of you already have stated above.
And I’m sad because despite all the time spent with Songbird, with the community, and after learning how to do basic XUL development, I think I’m about to leave Songbird and turn to MusicBee. I will keep Songbird only for a couple of features when needed (the Songbird+Flashgot integration to catch MP3 shows delivered by Flash players, and advanced tagging with Tagger), but my main music manager will be MusicBee soon, probably.
I’ll keep an eye on these pages though, to see if my ancient love is worth coming back home one day
See you, guys, and take care.
PS: this is actually the second time I’m leaving Songbird!! First one was in the early ages of Songbird…and I came back 3 years ago.
The sad thing is that MusicBee is not open source software, which was the real distinguishing feature for Songbird. Now, the Android app is not even open source.
Jason J has it:
“unable to commit due to bugginess, a seeming lack of updates, bug fixes and regard for stability”
I’m stuck on version 1.4.3 because of that.
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/to_upgrade_or_not_to_upgrade-11qkq0
katana346 points out that
“the Songbird team cannot *directly* be blamed for the lack of up-to-date extensions”
Although that is true, some of these extensions should have been core in the first place.
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/feature_parity_with_media_monkey
I’m using Media Monkey now but I might take a look at nightingale.
Maybe Nightingale will be LibreOffice and Songbird will die like OpenOffice!
I had been looking to an alternative to Songbird for months now, began using Winyl but as nice as it is, it’s still in it’s early stages. After reading jech’s comment here I tried out MusicBee and was finally satisfied. Exactly like others have said, aside from being closed-source it’s everything Songbird should have been.
Anybody else notice the two spam comments above me?
Anyway, whatever happens, Nightingale will survive.
Use to be excited about Songbird, but it just kept going further off track. I stopped using it last year due to the slow development, lack of useful features, performance, and bugs. Read the comments above about Musicbee, gave it try. It is nearly everything Songbird should’ve been.
I think the problem is this company cant commit and develop a single well-designed cohesive product. You change direction before any progress can be made and it has cost you in the end.
Good luck.
Something has to be done about how add-ons work. I see TONS of cool, useful looking add-ons, from themes to stuff like Media Flow, Grid View, Album View…all stuff compatible up to 1.09, heck, some up to 1.10.a or something like that. We’re on 1.10.1, and all of a sudden, these add-ons are so incompatible that Songbird won’t let you download them?
This is nuts, not every update should break so many extensions!