Software-update: Songbird 0.1

Songbird is een opensource- en crossplatformmuziekspeler die gebruikmaakt van Mozillas XULRunner en VLC, en kan onder meer mp3-, wma-, aac-, ogg- en flac-bestanden afspelen. De speler wordt ontwikkeld met de gedachte om tegengewicht te bieden aan programma's zoals Apple iTunes en Windows Media Player. Songbird is in staat om niet alleen muziekbestanden, lokale playlists en muziekdatabases draaien, maar kan ook muziekbestanden, playlists en muziekdatabases afspelen die ergens op het web staan. Daarnaast is de functionaliteit van Songbird uit te breiden met behulp van extensions. Een overzicht van alle huidige en te verwachten features staat op deze pagina.

De ontwikkelaars - die onder leiding staan van Rob Lord, een van de eerste werknemers van Nullsoft (de makers van Winamp) en medeoprichter van Internet Underground Music Archive - van Songbird hebben onlangs de eerste previewversie van de speler uitgebracht. Deze versie staat hier geparkeerd en is alleen beschikbaar voor het Windows-platform. Een eerste Linux- en Mac OS X-uitvoeringen staat gepland voor de volgende release van Songbird. Extra informatie over deze release en van Songbird zelf is te vinden in dit interview. Vooralsnog moeten we het doen met de Windows-variant, die de volgende release notes met zich meebrengt:

This release is not intended to replace your current desktop media player... yet.

This release represents our first steps upon the path to a truly next generation media player. It is meant to give users a firm idea of the direction we are heading, but we would be the first to admit we are far from there with our 0.1 build. And we wouldn't want to claim to be.

Our tiny amount of C++ code is included in the build, but a working public build system is still in the rapidly nearing future. We would ask people interested in Songbird development to have a bit more patience until we're ready for them.

However, we want to invite you all to import your media into our player, let it scan your metadata, and explore the (admittedly hardcoded at the moment) integration of a web browser into a media player. We equally invite you to browse web pages containing links to media content, and explore the integration of a media player into a web browser.

We have tons of links to let you have an idea of the breadth of what we're intending, but we assure you that they won't be hardcoded like that once we're further along. There will be an easy process to install any services you like and uninstall any services that annoy you.

In addition, there are certainly some known issues you all should be aware of, the worst of which being a pair of crashbugs and the fact that the browser part of the application wants to use RAM like a browser and not a media player.

Lastly, our metadata scanning is currently hacked in through VLC, and that approach is somewhat CPU intensive and further leaks some of the RAM it sends back to the app. So if you have a huge media collection on a slow machine, you might want to let the app be while it says it is "Scanning..." or you can click on that text to pause and resume the metadata scan while you play with our proof of concept. Modern machines should be just fine.

But take a deep breath, remind yourself it's just a 0.1, and take a long hard look in the direction we're pointing. We assure you, this is just the beginning.[break]

Het library-scherm van Songbird 0.1