Songbird media browser debut a crashing success

I realize that this is hardly the first time Songbird has been mentioned here. And to be honest, I still have mixed feelings. The concept is very cool and I fully support the effort put into it by their dev team. But can they really continue with long term adoption? I ams still a little bit skeptical…

Songbird, an open source media player built on the Firefox browser engine, debuted this month to fanfare from a few blogs heralding it as the second coming of digital music. For a while on the day of its release it was such a popular download that it caused the servers hosting it to crash.

Songbird version 0.1, a proof-of-concept release with only a few functional features, is a music player and Web browser that autodetects and imports most music file formats on users computers and in Web pages. The browser is currently available to download for Windows, with ports to Mac OS X and Linux in progress.

The plethora of stores that can be accessed through only one music player, such as iTunes, Napster, and Musicmatch, is limiting consumers’ adoption of digital media, says Rob Lord, project lead on Songbird and founder and chief executive of Pioneers of the Inevitable (POTI), the company developing the browser. Lord says Songbird’s creators want the application to centralize users’ interaction with digital music files. [Read the rest]

[tags]digital media,songbird,media browser,firefox browser engine,functional features[/tags]