Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Everyone is gushing over the great open-source iTunes clone, Songbird. Boing Boing is no different…

A team led by ex-Winamp-er Rob Lord today released a preview edition of Songbird, a desktop media player that offers an open source alternative to services like Apple’s iTunes and the Windows Media Player. Instead of connecting to one locked store full of DRMmed goods, it can connect to any and all available music (and video) on the internet.

Code brains behind the project include people who helped build Winamp, Muse, Yahoo’s “Y! Music Engine” media player, and developers from Mozilla Foundation. Initial release is for Windows only, with editions for other OSes to follow in the coming weeks.

Built on the same platform as Firefox, Songbird acts like a specialized web browser for music. It sees the online world through MP3-colored glasses — it looks at an archive of public domain sound files or a music store’s catalog, and displays available media for you.

Public domain music? Connect to any available music and video on the internet?

Woopdeedamneddoo…

1. The software is a blatant iTunes clone, only without the ability to sync to 83% of MP3 players on the market. Some “killer.”

2. iTunes can play MP3’s just as good as Songbird (the impression created by the Vacuous Hole is that iTunes cannot and that you’re tired to DRM).

3. It’s open source, which means there will be 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 point releases fixing one bug at a time 30 times a week.

Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll stick with iTunes. I’ll put my own CD’s into my library, buy a song every now and then, and even sync my beautiful shiny fifth generation iPod video.

Technorati Tags: itunes, songbird, boing boing, xeni, vacuous hole

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Sad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.