Open source media player Songbird seeks to enable open media distribution

For me, the most annoying thing about iTunes, the Zune marketplace and other like services is how they wall you into thoer platform pretty much with asking permission. Their application bestow privileges on my system upon themselves without asking. Songbbird promises to do things differently by enabling an open distribution model.

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. (Ars Technica)

By many accounts, Songbird is a bit buggy, and it is currently a work in progress. The concept is a possible answer to a long standing problem..I’ll be using it over the next few weeks and will report anything compelling here.