Songbird, open source competition for iTunes

Songbird, an open source would-be iTunes killer, was made available to the public for the first time today. Version 0.1.0. It builds on well-tested open source projects such as VLC and Firefox.

Since iTunes is free, and most consumers don’t particularly care one way or the other about open source, the success of Songbird will hinge on the things it can offer that Apple can’t or won’t. The most promising one is easy access to, and integration with, non-iTunes online music retailers like eMusic.com and CDBaby.com – and free sources like archive.org.

The servers at songbirdnest.com are slammed, so to help them out use the Coral cache to download if you want to try it.

There’s an interesting interview posted at BoingBoing.

I installed it on my PowerBook via Virtual PC, but MSVCP71.DLL couldn’t be found. Darn you, MSVCP71.DLL!


Jeremy commented on Fri Feb 10 04:33:34 2006:

Same problem on my PC running XP, hmmm.



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