Sad news: Songbird will no longer support Linux.
I gave Songbird two tries, and saw improvement and thought it had potential. It never reached a point where it could challenge Rhythmbox, but I was interested in where it was going. I did think if it reached it goals it would be a serious contender.
Now we’ve lost that.
The comments on the blog generally echo my thoughts:
This sucks, but do what you think is best.
What you think is best is stupid, because there are at least a dozen media players for Windows that are at least as good as Songbird already. You are giving up on a community of passionate users hungry for a solid iTunes alternative for an already overcrowded platform. Good luck.
Lyrebird
A Linux fork / un-official port / something-or-another named Lyrebird has already been announced, but the fact that the official version will not support Linux already pushes this into “second-class citizen” status. I’ll be willing to give it a look down the road – you never know – but right now I’m filing Songbird-and-related stuff in the “dead” file.
#1 by Andrew Luecke on April 4, 2010 - 1:41 pm
Actually, I'm one of the guy's who came up with the idea for the community branch, and I think there are a few things you don't recognise.
1) Take a look at: http://timeline.songbirdnest.com/vendor/browser/t... , and ask yourself what you see. What you see is a bunch of libraries DESIGNED for Linux. In fact, many of them POTI ported to Windows (such as Gstreamer). Many of these libs aren't officially supported by Windows.
2) iPod support is heavily Linux biased. I think that we can get it going again (properly in Linux, maybe somewhat better in Windows).
3) Some things such as using their own gstreamer caused massive problems too. I'm hoping that we can slowly phase out the use of forked dependencies, and use core libraries. In cases we can't immediately do so, I am hoping that we can handle it another way.. Either way, it should make us more acceptable to distro's.
4) POTI aren't going to intentionally break linux. I think we may be able to work alongside them, remain quite compatible (at least for the XUL stuff), and improve things for the better.
5) POTI use SVN still. We want to use Git which will really open development to the community.
I wouldn't be so quick to count us out
Those who do want to help, discuss it, or donate (honestly, we'd love shiny new Android phones, but helping would be better honestly), can join #lyrebird in irc.mozilla.org or discuss at talksongbird.com
I'm hoping as a project, we can be MUCH more open than most (POTI unfortunately can't be as open as they like because they have commercial partners and other things to worry about), and provide an experience which is as good as POTI's (and maybe better in some areas). We also hope our code is folded into the main Songbird base too (so everyone wins).
#2 by Jason on April 5, 2010 - 9:37 am
Andrew,
Thank you for your comments!
I wish you and others nothing but success with Lyrebird – I'll be interested in seeing what comes of the project.
#3 by Brandon on April 7, 2010 - 1:06 pm
I also tried Songbird for Linux a few times. The abillity to use an add-on system like Firefox, and Thunderbird seemed like a wonderful idea, and it was.
For me, Songbird was never stable enough to meet my needs, and I kept going back to Banshee.
Good luck on Lyrebird Andrew.
#4 by Jason on April 8, 2010 - 12:29 am
Brandon,
Thanks for the comments!
I agree – when I first encountered Songbird I thought of it as "The Firefox of Audio Players", which was a very powerful idea.
It was never quite able to live up to that, but we will see what
LyrebirdNightingale can deliver.