Songbird - 0.10 User Preview Version

Last week saw a big buzz around the release of the first public preview of Songbird the Firefox based 'iTunes killer'. This is a very early release, a proof of concept. So what is the concept?

Songbird is an opensource music player ala iTunes developed by some of the guys who worked on Winamp (aaahh the goodole days). It connects to the media on your local machine as well as podcasts, web based radio, playlists and may other web based content providers. It's built around the Firefox engine so it has many browser like features which will surely make it very flexible in the future. Also because it's opensource it's not tied into one music store or music service. Surely that must be a good thing!? I mean I only buy online music from iTunes Music Store because that's the app that I use to listen to music. On the other hand at present Songbird can't handle the DRM music that the other music stores sell (groan!). I also found that it couldn't play the AAC files I'd encoded in iTunes (good old Apple tweaked MP4).

As a concept Songbird is great! Time will tell if they can pull all the ideas together in a nice user friendly way. Bringing more music in under one opensource roof would be really good for consumers and I think long-term that's got to be good for the bands and record labels too.

Songbird is cross platform so whether you're on Windows, Linux or Mac go and check it out!

Download for free @ Songbirdnest.com