Songbird, the Firefox based media player, was released as a ‘User Preview’ (read alpha) amid much fanfare today. Billed as an alterternative for Windows Media Player and Itunes, Songbird comes from Rob Lord of Winamp fame and a team based of developers from the Mozilla Foundation, Muse and the Yahoo Music Engine.
Songbird is a complete desktop media player or "jukebox" with a uniquely open approach to Internet digital media network services. Examples of digital media network services included; eMusic’s á la carte MP3 store, Last.fm’s social networking service, Odeo’s podcast service or La Blogothèque, a personal MP3blog.
Digital media network services are varied and produced by a diversity of service providers, just like Web sites. New services and service type opportunties are fomenting as Internet users utilize more digital media in novel ways.
Still very much in testing stages there have been reports of numerous crashes and problems. This 0.1 release has been kind to me though and has sailed through the indexing of my mp3’s and wma’s. Using Firefox’s browser engine the intergration with many of the online music portals feels natural and the interface looks slick and stylish. Still a little buggy, though about par for the course, this looks as though its a music player with some potential. I just hope they update and release a little more often than Flock.
Mirrors
The Songbird crew have clearly been overwhelmed with the interest in this player which has had posts from Techcrunch and Lifehacker to name a few. The site has been down for the best part of 3 hours now though Mirrors are available here and here.
Thankgod for mirrors.