Songbird is a discontinued music player originally released in early 2006 with the stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web". Songbird utilizes the cross-platform frameworks Mozilla

XULRunner XULRunner is a discontinued, packaged version of the Mozilla platform to enable standalone desktop application development using XUL, developed by Mozilla. It replaced the ''Gecko Runtime Environment'', a stalled project with a similar purpose. ...

and

GStreamer GStreamer is a Pipeline (computing), pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one f ...

media framework. Songbird runs on

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

. In 2012, an Android version and an iOS version were released. Songbird at one point also supported Solaris and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, but this support was dropped. As a result, users forked Songbird and created a Windows, Mac, and Linux compatible derivative under the name

Nightingale The common nightingale, rufous nightingale or simply nightingale (''Luscinia megarhynchos''), is a small passerine bird which is best known for its powerful and beautiful song. It was formerly classed as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, ...

. Songbird announced on 14 June 2013 that it would stop all operations and shut down by 28 June. The company was unable to fund further business operations and as a result, all operations and associated services were discontinued.

Features

*Multi-platform compatibility with

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, Vista and Mac OS X v10.5 (x86, x86-64). *Ability to play multiple audio formats, such as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

, AAC,

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most common ...

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

Apple Lossless The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC, ), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc., Apple for lossless data compression of digit ...

and WMA *Ability to play Apple FairPlay-encoded audio on Windows and Mac platforms via hooks into

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

(authorization takes place in

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

) *Ability to play Windows Media DRM audio on Windows platforms *A skinnable interface, with skins called "feathers" *Media files stored on pages viewed in the browser show up as playable files in Songbird * MP3 file download *Ability to subscribe to MP3 blogs as

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop. ...

s *Ability to build custom mixes *Ability to scan the user's computer for all audio files and add them to a local library *A configurable and collapsible

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

similar to iTunes, and mini-player mode *Keyboard shortcuts and media keyboard support *Automatic updates * Last.fm integration via a plugin, complete with love/hate buttons *Insound.com and HypeMachine integration *Microsoft MTP compatible device support *Ability to edit and save metadata tags *Gapless Playback &

ReplayGain ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for in ...

*Watch Folders *Media Importing / Exportings (from and to iTunes) *Automatic Library Files Organization

Add-ons

Extensions

Users can add features and change functionality in Songbird by installing extensions. Extensions are similar to the

Extensions Extension, extend or extended may refer to: Mathematics Logic or set theory * Axiom of extensionality * Extensible cardinal * Extension (model theory) * Extension (proof theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values t ...

for the Firefox browser and can be easily ported. Community coded extensions are available on Songbird's addons support page. Known community designed extensions are: Qloud Tagging & Search, eMusic Integration, iTunes Importer, Artist Tracker, Library File Organizer, Audioscrobbler Notifier,

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

Artist Display, SHOUTcast Radio Directory, UnPlug,

Adblock Plus Adblock Plus (ABP) is a free and open-source browser extension for content-filtering and ad blocking. It is developed by Eyeo GmbH, a German software company. The extension has been released for Mozilla Firefox (including mobile), Google Chro ...

, Taglib

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

handler, ChatZilla, and FoxyProxy.

Skins

Skin Skin is the layer of usually soft, flexible outer tissue covering the body of a vertebrate animal, with three main functions: protection, regulation, and sensation. Other animal coverings, such as the arthropod exoskeleton, have different ...

s are referred to as "feathers" in Songbird and give users and artists the ability to change the look of Songbird via an extension which generates a default skin. Using CSS (and optionally XUL), and an image manipulation program such as

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editin ...

GIMP Gimp or GIMP may refer to: Clothing * Bondage suit, also called a gimp suit, a type of suit used in BDSM * Bondage mask, also called a gimp mask, often worn in conjunction with a gimp suit Embroidery and crafts * Gimp (thread), an ornamental tr ...

, users are then able to make Songbird look however they want.

History

Songbird was founded by Rob Lord and developed by Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for both

Winamp Winamp is a media player (software), media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Rad ...

and the Yahoo! Music Engine). In January 2010,

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...

announced they would ship a personalized version of Songbird with some of their line of portable audio/video players. On 2 April 2010, it was announced that official Linux support would end with Songbird version 1.7.2. POTI Inc. would instead focus on its Windows and Mac OS X versions of Songbird, providing only unofficial support for Linux releases. Sometime during late 2012 or early 2013, Songbird's public SVN was taken down, along with their wiki and other source code related utilities. A survey later sent out via

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

by Songbird suggested that POTI was closing the desktop player source code, planning to later sell an updated version, fixing many outstanding bugs and feature requests by users who had been ignored for years.

References

Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice wo ...

interview with Rob Lord
Lord of the Birds…Songbird
- Interview with Rob Lord
Songbird ver. 1.4.2 review at Lifehacker.com
- 23 December 2009, accessed 14 January 2010 {{DEFAULTSORT:Songbird (Software) 2006 software Free media players Free web browsers Gecko-based software Gopher clients IPod software Jukebox-style media players macOS media players Solaris media players Tag editors Windows media players Windows web browsers Portable software Linux media players Software that uses GStreamer Software that uses XUL Discontinued web browsers