Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

I’m always glad whenever Apple has some competition. Anything to light a fire under their asses is a good idea to me. And iTunes could use some serious competition. Maybe Songbird will provide that?

A multi-year effort to deliver an open-source and customizable iTunes rival came to fruition this week with the release of Songbird 1.0, but whether it will sway some users from the Apple jukebox software remains to be seen.

The cross-platform player is available as a free download for Intel-based Macs, Windows and Linux. It’s based on the same Gecko rendering engine that drives Mozilla’s Firefox browser but comes wrapped in an extensible user interface that could easily be mistaken for iTunes.

Unlike the Apple media software, whose features are governed by the iPod maker and its licensing agreements, Songbird prides itself on extensibility through add-ons that allow you to customize the media player experience through collapsable panels and gain new functionality.

In addition to support for QuickTime playback and a variety of iPods, the inaugural release includes four other add-ons by default. Among them are SHOUTcast radio streaming, Last.fm Scrobbling, and Songkick integration for discovering and acquiring concert tickets related to artists in your library.

The lack of iPhone and iPod Touch support is very puzzling though. Why wouldn’t it launch with that? That seems quite odd to me. Those two devices are so important to a lot of people.

Well we’ll see how Songbird shapes up in future releases. I will probably download it to play with it but I doubt I’ll use it seriously until the iPhone and iPod Touch support is there.

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