The music player Songbird has been a project I’ve been excited about for a long time [1]. When Songbird first appeared, it wasn’t great on Linux but it brought a promising feature into the music player mix: a built-in web browser, allowing you to surf to music blogs and grab free MP3s from the site. This integrated free music on the web with all the amenities of a modern music player: integrated for-pay music stores, a well-organized music library system, streaming content, and dynamic playlists. Since then, it’s become a reliable and beautiful project.
Alas, today, the project that was born from open-source, designed as a multi-platform player, is abandoning the Linux operating system [2]. And so, in symmetry, I am abandoning Songbird. The player that held such promise as a truly open-source, multi-platform project integrating music and the web has decided to go and compete against iTunes only on the platforms supported by iTunes (nicely pointed out by many comment posters on the Songbird Blog announcement of their decision). So long, good luck, and see ya later.
This comes at a bad time. As part of a streaming media integration project in my own home, Songbird played a central role. Jodi wanted to be able to listen to streaming radio when she’s working on bills in her office; Songbird let me marry streaming audio with our extensive digital music collection, and with an interface similar to iTunes it was familiar to Jodi. Instead, as of today, I have removed Songbird from all of our systems and instead have gone for Rhythmbox.
Rhythmbox is a great GNU/Linux project [3], but I abandoned it because of Songbird’s web integration. If Rhythmbox had a plugin that integrated a browser with this player, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. Rhythmbox has everything else I need except web integration.
Songbird said goodbye to Linux. So I can’t really respect them, and I can’t mourn the loss too long. It is refreshing to come back to Rhythmbox, and I look forward to seeing it evolve in Ubuntu 10.04 and beyond.
[1] http://www.getsongbird.com/
[2] http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2010/04/02/songbird-singing-a-new-tune/
One thought on “So long, Songbird”
Oh, weak! I just discovered Songbird and figured I could use that while I’m still running Windows* and that it would ease my transition to Linux once my XP becomes obsolete (cause I’m not paying for an upgrade). Oh well, RhythmBox ain’t bad.
* And of course one point of your post is that I _can_ continue to use it in Windows but clearly that’s not where my computer’s future is…