Songbird

[Mercutio]

"Songbird is a media browser and Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions."

It has a similar look and feel to iTunes - not a good start, IMO, but in practice it's really more a web browser with a builtin media player. That's not entirely a bad idea.
The library feature is either much, much faster in operation than iTunes, or it's taking advantage of both the x2s (not likely, as this is a .1 release). I sicced it on a directory structure containing 300GB of MP3s and had my music identified in about 10 minutes (reading the ID3 tags seems to be a background process now that I look at it).

As a player it's a little too... big for my taste, and I don't have time right now to find FLACs, OGGs or APE files to see if they'll play without help.

Anyway, there's more information about this thing at BoingBoing.

 

[Will Rickards]

Why would I want to play my ripped music through this rather than WMP?
I mean it is cool and all that it uses XULRunner but WMP already has my music categorized and my playlists saved.

 

[Mercutio]

How about the fact that Songbird doesn't have any DRM features which might somehow get turned on in your media player? How about the fact that it doesn't force you to use one-or-another music store (itunes = ITMS, Realplayer = Rhapsody, WMP = yahoo, walmart, napster et al.)?

I use WinAmp 3 and XMMS, personally, and I like the the "stereo receiver" UI metaphor that both of them use. I haven't ever used a player that has a library long enough to care whether it has a library or not (I have a lot of MP3s, FLACs, APEs whatever that I've downloaded or found somehow, but I don't listen to MP3s much, except at work). I can't stand the way itunes' library works, never bothered with WMP's (which I hate anyway, because the newer versions have DRM and really stupid-looking skins), and WinAmp 5 annoys me.

But I'm willing to look at this new thing. Maybe it'll suck less than those other guys.

 

[Sol]

I don't play a lot of audio files but I do watch a fair number of video files and I can't imagine why anyone would use WMP more than once... It's bloaty, not very compatible and the UI is so bad it hurts, that and the fact that it contains some security holes that make me wonder if the programmers at MS even think before they add a feature pretty much seals the deal as far as my never using it goes...

Mostly when I need to play an MP3 I use foobar2000 or whatever video player I have going. Somehow all the comercial mp3 players seem insanely bloaty... And sure they run fine anyway, but it still seems like a waste...

 

[Mercutio]

Computer-based Audio players mostly bug the crap out of me because they seem bloated. They almost all have lousy UIs. And things that were made to play audio are seldom any good for playing video (Winamp, media player, VLC, whatever) anyway.

Video applications need a 10' interface and some kind of non-sucky playlist management.

On my HTserver I almost always do video playback with PowerDVD. It's not perfect but it doesn't screw around with bloated crap like library functions, but it handles the full range of video needs (including fast forward, something WMP and MPclassic don't do) very well.

 

[CougTek]

Mostly when I need to play an MP3 I use foobar2000

Ditto.

 

[Gilbo]

Mostly when I need to play an MP3 I use foobar2000

Ditto.

On Windows I wouldn't use anything else .

On the subject of Songbird, I have to admit I'm very curious now. There's an ArsTechnica overview on it that I just read. I didn't know it aimed to be a singe frontend for multiple music stores. If it could achieve that it would be A Good Thing. Ars, as usual, takes a critical look at the problems this vision faces as well.

One thing that always bothered me about the music business were the inherent monopolies involved. I'm not talking about price-fixing and all that nastiness. I'm talking about the fact that if you want to buy a a Charles Lloyd album you have to go to ECM. I'm talking about how labels always demand exclusive distribution rights. Any given artist's music is only available from one label. There's no competition at the level that consumers care for --at the level of the individual artists that they feel deserve their money (even if the artists aren't getting much or any of it ). I feel that with the young, competitive online music distribution companies, artists have an opportunity to establish a tradition of signing non-exclusive distribution deals --if they bargain directly with the online distributors. But who knows how this mess is going to turn out. Personally, I'm still buying CDs --once I know they're worth it-- or downloading from etree.org or the Internet Live Music Archive. I still haven't seen the light at the end of this particular tunnel.

I am very glad that someone is trying to build an Open portal to look through though...