dm_blog

Just finished installing Songbird..the latest media player from Mozilla foundation.
The download is around 39 MB and the install was a breeze (Installations are always a breeze on the Mac :0). First take - it looks almost same as iTunes and the dialog boxes have a very firefoxy feel to them.
It might even look like iTunes with Feathers(themes) and plugins to the untrained eye which happen to the first distinguishing features. I’m not sure of the media freaks out there, but I almost never felt the need to install a plug in for iTunes. If ever I came across a file which iTunes or Quicktime couldn’t play, I used VLC player which knows how to play almost every conceivable format in the universe. The comeback and success of Apple has only reinstated the concept of simplicity and iTunes like other apple products, lives by it.
Another not so apparent feature is the use of tabs. Tabs in Songbird work just like tabs in firefox. You can browse music stores or community sites and it looks a up and loads a list of songs that you download or buy or that are being discussed on that site. I loaded “The hype machine” in one of the tab and it quickly loaded the songs that were being discussed in the pane below with links to the blogs which might sound to cool to some people (not me).
One feature which is missing, or maybe I missed, is equalizers! I think its a very basic feature that all media players must have and I’m simply not going to use a player with an equalizer! Contrast this with iTunes where you can store equalizer settings per song!
Visualizers are almost missing. Not that I’m a big fan of visualizers, but it serves as a good screensaver every now and can even be used to flaunt your high end graphics card if you’ve got one.
I guess the open source community has developed a habit of attacking anything successful in the corporate world. First it was Microsoft and now its Apple. With Ubuntu taking on Mac OS and Songbird trying to take on iTunes. This also looks likes an attempt by the mozilla foundation to eat away iTune’s share of the music world. Open source works by “commoditizing” software - taking away the exclusivity of software & ideas and this is a clear attempt by Mozilla to take on iTunes.

Ah, yes, Songbird can be downloaded from http://getsongbird.com/

cucumberboy Mozilla, Open source, Songbird, iTunes