Songbird (software)

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Songbird
Songbird 0.2 running on Windows XP
Maintainer:	The Songbird Team
Stable release:	0.2.5 (March 1, 2007) _[+/-]
Preview release:	none (N/A) _[+/-]
OS:	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
Use:	Media player
License:	GPL
Website:	www.songbirdnest.com

Songbird is a free software media player that, as of 2006, is in early development. Songbird is a combination of a desktop web player, a digital jukebox and web browser. It is an alternative to proprietary media players such as iTunes.

Songbird is built on Mozilla's XULRunner platform.^[1] Because of this, Songbird is able to run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux personal computers with few modifications. Songbird uses the VLC plugin for media playback, and SQLite as the storage engine for the media library. It should be noted that Songbird for Linux uses the GStreamer Media Framework instead of VLC.

Songbird's first public preview release, versioned 0.1, codenamed "Hilda," was released on February 8, 2006.^[2] The current 0.2.5 version was released on March 1, 2007.^[3]

1 Features
2 Extensions
3 Skins
4 Localization
5 User agent
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] Features

Songbird finds media files on a web page

According to the Songbird 0.2 RC1 release notes,^[4] current features are:

Cross platform compatibility with Windows 2000, XP, Mac OS X (PPC, Intel) and Linux (Intel).
Ability to play multiple audio formats, such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Windows Media Audio.
Able to play Apple and Windows Media DRM encoded audio.^[5]
A skinnable interface, called feathers in Songbird.
Media files stored on pages viewed in the browser show up as playable files in Songbird.
Built in RSS subscription and MP3 file download.
The ability to subscribe to mp3 blogs as playlists.
User created bookmarks.
Ability to build custom mixes.
Ability to scan the user's computer for all audio files and add them to a local library.
An easily configurable and collapsible graphical user interface, and miniplayer mode.
Keyboard shortcuts & media keyboard support.
Automatic updates.
eMusic integration using the eMusic Integration plugin.

As of October 2006, there are no written programs using external methods to obtain now playing song data from the Songbird client, and no way to export or import RSS subscriptions using OPML, a feature available in free/open source RSS media players such as Juice.

[edit] Extensions

Version 0.2 shipped with two extensions, a Dom Inspector and an Example Extension. More community coded extensions are available on Songbird's extension support page. Known community designed extensions are: Qloud Tagging & Search, Windjay, eMusic Integration, iTunes Importer, iPod Device, Artist Tracker, Library File Organizer, Audioscrobbler Notifier, Wikipedia Artist Display, SHOUTcast Radio Directory, Unplug, Ad-block Plus (install.rdf must be modified) , and Minimize-to-Systemtray.

[edit] Skins

Skins are referred to as "feathers" in the Songbird project. The 0.2 release shipped with two feathers: the default dark "Rubberducky" feather (shown above), and "Dove", a white iTunes styled skin.

[edit] Localization

There are currently 39 localizations of Songbird for the 0.2 release.

[edit] User agent

As Songbird has a built-in web browser, it needs a user agent string to identify itself. For example, Songbird responds with the following user agent under an English version of Windows XP

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20061018 Songbird/0.2

Deconstructed, a Mozilla client running Windows XP using a 2006 October 18 build of Songbird 0.2 client with an American English locale. The main change from the user agent of the Firefox web browser is replacing "Firefox/..." with "Songbird/...".