HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

(Don’t you just love our descriptive titles?) Songbird was released a few days ago. It’s an open-source iTunes-like-looking media player, based on Firefox. It doesn’t lock you when it comes to choosing a digital music store as it can handle both DRM and non-DRM stores fine. You can also use it browse sites that carry music files—a pane surfaces at the bottom listing the available music files and allowing for easy access.

These are all good in theory, but there are tons of kinks to iron out with the current release of Songbird. They’re calling it a “Proof of concept” release (new Web 2.0 term? never heard it before), which means “yeah, we need to seriously get to work”; not pretty encouraing if you consider the project’s initial release date had been released for a few months. And they need to move fast or I can see the letters F-L-O-C-K forming on the horizon. (Ironicall, I just noticed they have a post on Songbird—heh.)

There’s an interview with the head of the project (and former Nullsoft employee), Rob Lord, where they’re discussing the motives behind creating the app and its potential. And there is potential, and I want to see Songbird succeed, which is why I sounded a bit harsh in this presentation. You may also want to read this more thorough, less-hate-filled review [via].