New Music Service Built out of Spare Mozilla Parts

**Lemur** · 02-09-2006, 21:36

Anybody heard about Songbird yet? It was news to this lemur. Appears to be built entirely out of Mozilla's XML, claims it can interface with any music store, nice clone of the iTunes interface. Veeeeeery interesting. Good discussion of it at Ars Technica.

Thoughts?

**Xiahou** · 02-10-2006, 01:16

I don't understand how it can be open source and yet support proprietary DRM like WMAs or AACs?

Have you tried it yet?

**Lemur** · 02-10-2006, 03:55

I don't know how it's going to handle DRM files. It's in the interests of people like Apple, Napster and MSN Music to keep everything in their own backyard, so how the Songbird guys are going to get through that miasma of corporate short-sightedness I dunno. But there's nothing proprietary about AAC and WMA as *audio* files. AAC is based on MPEG-4, which is an open spec. Whatever WMA is based on, it's pretty old, so even if one can't obtain rights to it, there are sure to be plenty of clones. It's sort of like the way JPEG is (supposedly) patented, but verybody's found ways to use the format without paying the patent-zombies a dime.

I haven't tried it yet. I don't really jump on board until projects reach version 0.5, or for Microsoft, version 2.0. But this is one I'm planning to keep my eye on. The guys who made WinAmp weren't dummies, and I love the idea of building a frickin' media player out of the bones of Firefox. Unbelievable. This ain't gonna be vaporware.

**R'as al Ghul** · 02-10-2006, 12:06

Originally Posted by Lemur

I don't know how it's going to handle DRM files. It's in the interests of people like Apple, Napster and MSN Music to keep everything in their own backyard, so how the Songbird guys are going to get through that miasma of corporate short-sightedness I dunno.

I can see how this can be a good application. It combines many things in one.
Downloading from podcasts, radio, free directories, p2p etc. is no big deal though.
Having it all in one place is what makes it very comfortable.
So, it claims that it can communicate with those online-musicstores as well. That's where
I remain sceptical. I'm not saying that it can't manage your multiple store logins but
how are the stores going to reply to this?
I thought that itunes and other likely software apps require somehing more than login and pass.
don't they have unique ID's with which they identify themselves? Or do you just download via browser?
I have to admit that I have not yet downloaded from a store.
Can anyone shed some light on this?

**Lemur** · 02-10-2006, 15:29

Originally Posted by R'as al Ghul

It claims that it can communicate with those online-musicstores as well. That's where
I remain sceptical. I'm not saying that it can't manage your multiple store logins but how are the stores going to reply to this?

Well, assuming you have a valid login to their store, they might have to put up with it. The only question mark would be Apple, since they control an entire separate application that interfaces with their iTunes website. Eh, I guess I shouldn't call it a "website," should I? Since it's not made of proper HTML anymore ...

I thought that itunes and other likely software apps require somehing more than login and pass.
don't they have unique ID's with which they identify themselves? Or do you just download via browser?

I don't know about every single store, but with iTunes you download using the application Apple gives away. So currently you need 3 things -- a proper login and password, a custom application and a network connection. Assuming you have a valid login, I can definitely see how clever geeks could reverse-engineer the calls and APIs being used by the stores. I mean, it's been done before. And it's not necessarily illegal.

Althoug under the super-evil DMCA, even thinking about reverse-engineering something is probably illegal. But then we're getting into illegal versus illegal.

**R'as al Ghul** · 02-10-2006, 15:47

Originally Posted by Lemur

I don't know about every single store, but with iTunes you download using the application Apple gives away. So currently you need 3 things -- a proper login and password, a custom application and a network connection. Assuming you have a valid login, I can definitely see how clever geeks could reverse-engineer the calls and APIs being used by the stores. I mean, it's been done before. And it's not necessarily illegal.

Okay, I can see how that could work.
But I expect outrage when this gets popular.
Just imagine: "Mmh, do I download that new song from p2p, radio or do I pay for it on itunes?"

It seems it's a very smart product. I think I'll test it's radio capabilities.
Until now recording streams from internet-radios is not exactly user-friendly.
Either you've one huge file that needs cutting or every song misses start and end parts. I've used the streamripper plugin for winamp for that.
Since I'm sitting in Europe I don't give a **** about the DMCA.
It remains to be proven anyway if p2p did really cause a drop in sales.
If interested I can provide links to studies that prove that the opposite is true.