Comments on: A Firefox for music?

The Pioneers of the Inevitable are taking aim at iTunes, with open-source music software called Songbird.

[jdsmith123]

Slimserver anyone?

I believe I've been doing this with www.slimdevices.com for some time now... free software, optional hardware.

[mrcheese]

it's the webservices, stupid

Is everybody taking crazy pills? enough with the comparisons to iTunes, WinAmp, Foobar, Foobz, etc.

The one and only interesting thing about Songbird is that it will be open to all web stores. That, not the layout and nothing else, is revolutionary.

The whole point is that right now Apple has a stranglehold on the world of music stores, and its market share is growing constantly. And it grows mostly because iPod is popular and the services to iTunes are very very closed source and evil.

The fact that Songbird may open up the race to others, or in fact get rid of the race at all is huge. Every small band will be able to set up shop and sell directly with a little bit of HTML and javascript. And big stores like Amazon will be able to compete with Apple - I can't wait for that.

[yfan]

Agreed

I agree with the basic premise of your comment, although I'm not sure what damage, if any, Songbird will do to Apple Music Store. Yes, other music services will be able to compete, but they are able to compete now. Apple has an advantage in the Mac market, since many services, like Yahoo's music service refuse to make their software OS X compatible. The iPod is still the best MP3 player, IMHO.

Nonetheless, Songbird will open up the market of music, and we will be able to use multiple music services and comparison shop, without having to download a bunch of different jukeboxes.

[JuggerNaut]

"PlaysForSure" more closed than "FairPlay"!

WMP and PlaysForSure is just as closed (if not more) than iTunes and FairPlay. iTunes is at least cross-platform to Windows and Mac whereas WMP (Napster, etc...) is Windows-only. The iPod itself plays friendly with the BIG 3 platforms; Windows, Mac and Linux, making the iPod the cross-platform standard whereas all the other "PlaysForSure" devices are again a Windows-only thing that has nothing significant to offer the consumer and is totally unappealing to a cross-platform computing world in which we live and compute (hence the real world of computing)!

I too am looking forward to Songbird's real potential in the consumer market since we could use such a solution to enhance cross-platform compatibility even more than what is available today. May the best solution win in the end of course :-)

[Mage66]

iSongs Anyone?

There ALREADY IS an Open Sourced iTunes workalike..

It's from Linspire, Inc. and it's called iSongs.

It works great!

Why would anyone want to make YET ANOTHER?

Just contribute to iSongs, and maybe port it to Windows and MacOS?

[linit]

LSongs, it's called LSongs

Not only is LSongs like itunes it will also sync your music to your Ipod. Linspire is putting the libraries it created for this on sourceforge so others can write new apps too :)

Been there, done that...

It's called Amarok. A Windows and a Mac port
would not be too hard.

[mythos1952]

Please please

I will support anyone who wishes to create an intelligent, useful, configurable music library manager.

MusicMatch almost got there with its library management but is now history,
MediaMonkey thinks it's better than it is,
WinAmp is clunky,
and about 15 others I have tried are worse.

Pleae relieve me of my misery as my library is over 50000 songs.

Thanks