Ian McKellar gave a presentation on the Songbird media player at LugRadio Live this past weekend. The talk introduced some of the underlying goals behind the Songbird project and included a demonstration of some of the core technologies in the Songbird media player.

Songbird is an open source media client with tight web integration that is designed by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a San Francisco-based company whose previous efforts include WinAmp and the Yahoo Music Engine. Songbird is still in early stages of development, but is already quite usable on the desktop. Version 0.5 was released late last month with MTP device support and user interface improvements.

The Songbird developers aim to create an open ecosystem for media technologies that will liberate users from the closed end-to-end media solutions offered by Microsoft and Apple. The monolithic media architectures used by those companies, which tie music stores to specific software players and specific devices, have stifled creativity and innovation. Songbird gives users a way to escape from vendor lock-in and also creates the potential for more competition and innovation in media services and digital content distribution.

"There are a few major players in the market right now and the users are left out in the cold," said McKeller. "We need a way that we can build services to do exciting new media stuff, but built on open standards and built on open source—the stuff that empowers users and developers and builds better creativity."

New protocols like BitTorrent make it easier for independent content creators to distribute material. There are also increasingly popular labels like Matador which eschew RIAA membership and sell DRM-free music. These factors have led to the emergence of an independent, web-driven music ecosystem that exists outside of Apple's walled garden, but there is no equivalent of iTunes to bring all of the pieces together. That is where Songbird fits into the picture. "The missing piece is the user agent," McKellar told the audience. "We need a Mosaic or Mozilla for the media web."







Ian McKellar at LugRadio Live

Inspired by Mozilla's model of Internet empowerment, the Songbird developers "took a web browser and a media player and stitched them together," so that users could "browse [their] music and play the web," McKellar stated. Songbird is built on a variety of open source technologies, including Firefox's Gecko rendering engine and the GStreamer multimedia framework. The Songbird developers are active upstream contributors and have been working with Fluendo and Collabora to improve cross-platform GStreamer support so that the framework can be used across all operating systems and leverage native codecs on Mac OS X and Windows.

The Songbird media player uses Firefox's XML-based XUL user interface description language to provide a very high level of extensibility. Some popular Firefox extensions can be ported to Songbird with only a few lines of code, said McKellar, and new extensions can be created to customize many aspects of the music player. It even supports Greasemonkey, which enables users to add specialized functionality with JavaScript. Support for extensions makes it possible for users to swap out parts of the default interface with custom interface components that better suit their requirements. To demonstrate this, McKellar showed how the default artist and album browser could be replaced with a tag cloud interface. He also demonstrated an extension that displays a Wikipedia page with information about the musician of the currently playing song. "The goal is to give people context around the music they are playing," said McKellar.

Songbird also includes built-in web browsing capabilities and offers a unique page API that enables web content creators to interact with the media player. When given permission by the user, web sites can use the Songbird page API to retrieve information about currently playing tracks, create playlists, and interact with the user's media experience in other ways. Some independent labels like Matador even use the APIs to turn Songbird into a user-friendly music store for their content. Since these capabilities are all documented, anyone can use Songbird as a platform for building new content distribution channels and innovative web-based media services.

Although Songbird is very promising, the player itself is still relatively new and will require some additional work. The developers intend to focus on improving performance, usability, device support, and music management capabilities.