![]() | |
![]() Songbird 2.0.0 on Windows 7 | |
Developer(s) | Pioneers of the Inevitable aka POTI Inc. |
---|---|
Initial release | 8 February 2006 |
Final release | |
Preview release | None [±] |
Operating system | |
Platform | |
Available in | 98 languages [2] |
Type | Media player |
License | GNU GPLv2 with exceptions; Android client closed source |
Website | getsongbird |
Songbird is a discontinued music player originally released in early 2006 with the stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web". [3]
Songbird utilizes the cross-platform frameworks Mozilla XULRunner and GStreamer media framework. Songbird runs on Windows and macOS. In 2012, an Android version and an iOS version were released. Songbird at one point also supported Solaris and Linux, but this support was dropped. As a result, users forked Songbird and created a Windows, Mac, and Linux compatible derivative under the name Nightingale.
Songbird announced on 14 June 2013 that it would stop all operations and shut down by 28 June. The company was unable to fund further business operations and as a result, all operations and associated services were discontinued. [4]
Users can add features and change functionality in Songbird by installing extensions. Extensions are similar to the Extensions for the Firefox browser and can be easily ported. [5] Community coded extensions are available on Songbird's addons support page. Known community designed extensions are: Qloud Tagging & Search, eMusic Integration, iTunes Importer, Artist Tracker, Library File Organizer, Audioscrobbler Notifier, Wikipedia Artist Display, SHOUTcast Radio Directory, UnPlug, Adblock Plus, Taglib metadata handler, ChatZilla, and FoxyProxy.
Skins are referred to as "feathers" in Songbird and give users and artists the ability to change the look of Songbird via an extension which generates a default skin. Using CSS (and optionally XUL), and an image manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP, users are then able to make Songbird look however they want.
Songbird was founded by Rob Lord and developed by Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for both Winamp [6] and the Yahoo! Music Engine).
In January 2010, Philips announced they would ship a personalized version of Songbird with some of their line of portable audio/video players. [7]
On 2 April 2010, it was announced that official Linux support would end with Songbird version 1.7.2. POTI Inc. would instead focus on its Windows and Mac OS X versions of Songbird, providing only unofficial support for Linux releases.
Sometime during late 2012 or early 2013, Songbird's public SVN was taken down, along with their wiki and other source code related utilities. A survey later sent out via Twitter by Songbird suggested that POTI was closing the desktop player source code, planning to later sell an updated version, fixing many outstanding bugs and feature requests by users who had been ignored for years. [8]
Color | Meaning |
---|---|
Red | Old release |
Yellow | Unreleased, internal milestone |
Green | Current release |
Blue | Future release |
Version | Release date | Codename | Significant changes |
---|---|---|---|
0.1 | 8 February 2006 | Hilda | |
0.1.1 | 22 February 2006 |
| |
0.2 RC1 | 26 September 2006 | ||
0.2 | 17 October 2006 |
| |
0.2.5 | 28 February 2007 |
| |
0.3 | 30 October 2007 | Bowie | |
0.3.1 | 6 November 2007 |
| |
0.4 | 27 December 2007 | Cher |
|
0.5 | 26 March 2008 | Dokken |
|
0.6 | 13 June 2008 | Eno |
|
0.6.1 | 25 June 2008 |
| |
0.7 | 20 August 2008 | Fugazi |
|
1.0 | 2 December 2008 | Genesis |
|
1.1.1 | 10 March 2009 | Hendrix | |
1.1.2 | 9 April 2009 | Hootie |
|
1.2 | 18 June 2009 | Isan |
|
1.3 | — | Jackson 5 |
|
1.4 | December 2009 | Kanye |
|
1.4.3 | 23 December 2009 | KoЯn |
|
1.5 | — | Led Zeppelin |
|
1.6.0 | — | Madonna |
|
1.7.0 | — | Nirvana |
|
1.7.2 | 3 June 2010 | NOFX |
|
1.8.0 | 2 September 2010 | Orbital |
|
1.9.3 | 9 February 2011 | Pink Floyd |
|
1.10.1 | 1 November 2011 | Qbert |
|
1.10.2 | 25 January 2012 |
| |
1.10.3 | 22 May 2012 |
| |
2.0.0 | 8 June 2012 |
| |
2.1 | 31 October 2012 |
| |
2.2 | 15 February 2013 |
|
QuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was available for download on Windows until 2016.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the Internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.
VLC media player is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.
RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3, MP4, QuickTime File Format, Windows Media format, and the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems; Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian versions have been released.
Kodi is a free and open-source media player and technology convergence software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It allows users to play and view most streaming media, such as videos, music, podcasts, and videos from the Internet, as well as all common digital media files from local and network storage media, or TV gateway viewer.
ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for individual tracks or albums. This avoids the common problem of having to manually adjust volume levels between tracks when playing audio files from albums that have been mastered at different loudness levels.
Google Video was a free video hosting service, originally launched by Google on January 25, 2005.
Adobe Flash Player is computer software for viewing multimedia contents, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the Adobe Flash platform. It can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or independently on supported devices. Originally created by FutureWave under the name FutureSplash Player, it was renamed to Macromedia Flash Player after Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996. It was then developed and distributed by Adobe Systems as Flash Player after Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. It is currently developed and distributed by Zhongcheng for users in China, and by Harman International for enterprise users outside of China, in collaboration with Adobe.
FoxyTunes was a browser extension allowing control of media players from the web browser window. The company that developed FoxyTunes was bought by Yahoo! in 2008, and FoxyTunes was closed in 2013.
Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation, and gave support to developers for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. The browser is also the main component of ChromeOS, where it serves as the platform for web applications.
Digital Audio Control Protocol (DACP) is a protocol used by the iTunes and other audio player and server applications on Mac, Windows and Linux computers, enabling remote control by mobile devices such as iPhone and Android phones and tablet computers. By connecting the personal computer to loudspeakers the mobile device is used as a two-way remote control, allowing selection and control of music playback within a traditional listening environment such as a home or apartment.
Hollywood is a commercially distributed programming language developed by Andreas Falkenhahn which mainly focuses on the creation of multimedia-oriented applications. Hollywood is available for AmigaOS, MorphOS, WarpOS, AROS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Hollywood has an inbuilt cross compiler that can automatically save executables for all platforms supported by the software. The generated executables are completely stand-alone and do not have any external dependencies, so they can also be started from a USB flash drive. An optional add-on also allows users to compile projects into APK files.
Nightingale is a discontinued free, open source audio player based on the Songbird media player source code. As such, Nightingale's engine is based on the Mozilla XULRunner with libraries such as the GStreamer media framework and libtag providing media tagging and playback support, amongst others.
Firefox was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser, first released as Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004. Starting with version 5.0, a rapid release cycle was put into effect, resulting in a new major version release every six weeks. This was gradually accelerated further in late 2019, so that new major releases occur on four-week cycles starting in 2020.
mpv is free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several operating systems, including Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows, along with having an Android port called mpv-android. It is cross-platform, running on ARM, PowerPC, x86/IA-32, x86-64, and MIPS architecture.