Songbird the Open Source iTunes? 226
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"
Re:MusicKube (Score:4, Informative)
Article text in case of /.'ing (Score:0, Informative)
A Firefox for music?
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: December 22, 2005, 4:00 AM PST
If digital-music veteran Rob Lord wanted to court controversy with his new open-source start-up, he probably couldn't have done much better than to compare Apple Computer's iTunes software to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.
Lord's new five-person company, the ambitiously named Pioneers of the Inevitable, is building a piece of digital-music software called "Songbird," based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.
With their first technical preview expected early next year, the programmers want to create music-playing software that will work naturally with the growing number of music sites and services on the Web, instead of being focused on songs on a computer's hard drive. That's where iTunes, which plugs only into Apple's own music store, falls short, Lord argues.
Apple's iTunes is "like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com," Lord said. "We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures."
An Apple representative declined to comment.
It is undeniable that music software and services are moving increasingly off the hard drive and onto the Web. But if Songbird is to be the "Firefox of MP3" when it's done, it has a long way to go.
Indeed, analysts question whether a world awash in music-playing software from Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks, Yahoo, Sony and others really needs another digital jukebox.
Among those giants, Microsoft's Media Player accounts for 45 percent of all PC music playing, Apple's iTunes captures 17 percent, and the rest fall off sharply from there, according to U.S. statistics from the NPD Group.
But even with those odds, Lord has enough of a pedigree to make the industry stop and take notice. A co-founder of the Internet Underground Music Archive, an online music site predating the MP3 boom, as well as one of the first employees at Winamp creator Nullsoft, he was most recently a product manager for the launch of Yahoo's music software and subscription service, after his last start-up, Taco Bell, was purchased by the portal.
Songbird could have a built-in audience of open-source fans to give it a good start. And don't forget, just a few years ago, who would have counted on the success of the Firefox browser? Since its first full-version release a year ago, the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox has defied skeptics and managed to grab close to 8 percent or 9 percent of the browser market, although estimates vary.
And programmers working with the Mozilla Foundation say the Songbird project has their attention.
"We're excited to see an ecosystem of companies building technology around Mozilla," said Scott MacGregor, technical lead for the Thunderbird project, an open-source e-mail reader. "It's a healthy sign for Mozilla and open source in general."
Under the microscope
Even before the software has been released, Songbird has stirred up a hornet's nest of online critics and boosters on outside blogs and even on the company's own Web site.
Screenshots posted on the company's Web site show a software application clearly modeled closely after iTunes' browsing style. The parallels drew instant ridicule from Apple loyalists, who pointed out that Apple had in fact patented software with three "panes" for browsing through a media collection.
Until the software is released even in a preview stage, it's hard to tell whether that will indeed be a problem. But Lord says that's missing the point.
iTunes does have a good basic interface for browsing a music collection, but Songbird isn't tied to any one look, he said. It's built on technology that allows developers to change the look of the application with the same simple tools the
Easy fix (Score:3, Informative)
Lipstick [kde-look.org] is also quite nice.
Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:1, Informative)
Not copied. Bought.
oh, please (Score:5, Informative)
NeXT combines the Smalltalk programming model, the Stepstone Objective-C language, the GNU compiler, the CMU Mach kernel, and the Adobe Postscript language (not much original there, but at least NeXT paid for some of it). Jobs did a great job at putting together NeXT out of existing technologies, but he didn't exactly contribute a lot of technology.
Let me repeat: there is nothing wrong for Apple copying from other people, but Apple should stop complaining (and sueing) when people copy from them.
Re:It's not the store, it's the licensing (Score:3, Informative)
True, but it's a product announcement from Rob Lord, one of the two guys who started IUMA way back near the beginning of the web age. A product announcement from somebody with a history of creating products that were ahead of their time is worth paying attention to. He was running a hugely successful online music site 5 years before most of the world had even considered the idea.
As a former competitor of Rob's, I'd take him seriously; he knows what he's doing, at least with regards to technology. (He didn't know how IUMA was going to make money either; he probably should have thought more about that.) Of course there's no guarantee that Songbird will be a success, but based on Rob's track record, I'd say it'll be worth seeing what he comes up with.
Re:It's not the client, it's the store (Score:2, Informative)
From the article you cite: "AllofMP3.com cannot be charged for piracy, prosecutors ruled, under the current criminal law."
That's not a technicality, that means what they're doing is not illegal, unless some other definition of illegal is in force than "acts you can be prosecuted for."
If it's legal for allofmp3.com to sell digital goods in Russia, then it would appear to be legal to import those digital goods to many jurisdictions. Under what US legislation is it illegal to buy an mp3 file in Russia and import it to the US?
As for other issues, according to this site [museekster.com] allofmp3.com pays licence fees to the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS) for the files it distributes. Rightsholders can collect remuneration through ROMS.
allofmp3.com appears on all the available evidence to be legal, and no amount of ranting about technicalities and "stupidly paying allofmp3.com [for] the privilege" negates that.
Why This Can't Work (Score:5, Informative)
When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, the AAC file is downloaded without FairPlay DRM encryption. The iTunes software adds the FairPlay DRM while downloading, encrypting the file with your iTMS account ID. An open-source client wouldn't do this (or at least wouldn't have to, if it could). Apple would be in a heap of trouble with the record labels if they allowed this software to exist.
The only way to make it work is to move the encryption process from the client to the server, which would significantly increase Apple's costs (in addition to the huge CPU requirements of encrypting every song they sell, they probably wouldn't be able to use Akami's distribution network anymore).
What I see is (Score:2, Informative)
Apple actually bought the iTunes interface. Full details at http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ [panic.com] . Good read for all developers.
Here is what Apple PAID FOR http://www.macupdate.com/screenshot.php?id=3714 [macupdate.com]