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by Ryan Tomayko.
Original Post: New Gig: Songbird
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This is a month belated or so, but here goes: I recently took a position with Pioneers Of The Inevitable, a 40ish-person startup that’s lovingly incubating the smartest media player ever: Songbird.
I've signed on to help build the nest — that’s “hack on web related stuff” in non-bird-metaphor-speak. It’s a unique and interesting position, really. The main product is first and foremost a desktop media player, but the critical feature distinguishing it from other desktop media players is its strong integration with the open web. There’s lots of room for building insanely cool and useful stuff here that wouldn’t normally be feasible with a pure web or pure desktop play.
(Before I go further: nothing on this site is affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by POTI / Songbird.)
Here’s a few choice quotes from POTI’s About page that will hopefully give some indication as to why, in addition to just hacking on cool stuff, I've been compelled to pick up and adventure 2,484 miles across the country:
Our mission is to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and
champion a diverse, open Media Web.
The normal, open web will eventually be your “Music Store”. That much I know for sure. What will it look like? That, I'm not so sure about yet. What Topspin is doing feels like a glimpse; what Yahoo! is doing – a glimpse from another angle. A player that understands these shifts, that might anticipate and even help catalyze them, is a much-needed and missing piece.
The player itself is built on top of Mozilla’s XULRunner (the same core platform as Firefox 3.0), the source is available under the GPLv2, and there’s an active community of contributors.
We don’t steal music and you shouldn’t either. We support
DigitalConsumer.org’s
Bill of Rights as
the best means to a burgeoning, diverse and lawful digital media market.
There’s a culture of cluefulness regarding all things web, media, art/creativity, law, and technology around the office. The intersection of these things has always been intensely interesting to me, if only because they've evolved into such a giant, incompatible cluster-fuck … and we should fix that.
Quick Note: Alpha
The player is currently alpha quality at 0.6, so there’s breakage and missing pieces and all that. The bird-builders are in striking distance of a first beta, though, and there’s a strong push to ship a solid 1.0 release sooner than later. Official/supported builds are available for Linux, Mac, and Windows but I'd suggest taking a nightly for a spin since there’s a ton of cool stuff landing every day.
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