Songbird

» see getsongbird.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

songbird shipped its first public preview on 8 february 2006. the company behind it was pioneers of the inevitable, a small san francisco shop founded by rob lord with a team that came out of winamp and yahoo music engine. the pitch was specific. itunes was the closed monolith on the music player layer, and firefox had just won the equivalent open-stack fight on the browser layer. songbird wanted to be the firefox of music: an open-source desktop player you could extend with addons and skin with feathers, running on every major desktop.

under the hood it was a mozilla application. xulrunner for the chrome and gstreamer for playback. that combination meant songbird could play almost any audio format people had on disk in the late 2000s. mp3, aac, ogg vorbis, flac, apple lossless, wma. it could pull last.fm scrobbles and sync to portable players, with an extension marketplace where third parties shipped lyrics panes or visualizers. for a few releases it felt like the player you wanted to win.

the open-source stack was also the trap. xulrunner was being de-emphasized inside mozilla and gstreamer's windows audio path was rough. every release of macos or windows broke something different. by 2010 songbird had dropped linux support to focus engineering on the two paying platforms. on 14 june 2013 poti announced operations would cease by 28 june. they could not fund further development. the website went static and the extensions repository went dark. the playlist database in everyone's profile folder turned into an artifact of a dead client.

i was a computer engineer with broadband by 2006 and tested whatever desktop music player the linux/mozilla crowd was excited about that month. songbird was the one with the most ambition for a few years. winamp was where my actual library lived, but songbird was the player you tried because the underlying mozilla stack made it the most promising "what if itunes had real plugins" candidate of its moment.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

songbird arrived in the same window as last.fm scrobbling becoming a real thing and as the first wave of "i have ten thousand mp3s on a usb drive" users hit a wall with itunes' library model. the early promise was that songbird could be the player that played nicely with everything outside its own walls. it indexed any folder you pointed at and scrobbled cleanly to last.fm. a built-in browser pane could pull lyrics or band pages while a track played. for a brief window it really looked like itunes had open-stack competition.

~ what it became ~

the gstreamer-on-windows audio path stayed buggy. xulrunner version bumps regressed extensions every cycle. the team was small and the funding was a series of seed and series-a checks rather than a real revenue model. by 2010 the linux build was dropped and the project narrowed to two desktops. by 2012 the release cadence had slowed to almost nothing. when the june 2013 announcement came, the user-facing surprise was that songbird had still been a going concern at all.

~ the next chapter ~

nightingale was the open-source fork that kept the codebase alive after poti shut down, but it never reached the original's reach. the songbird mobile player became a separate story that ended in its own quiet shutdown. the broader idea (a desktop music client built on a real open extension stack) had no successor. by the time songbird was gone the conversation had moved to streaming-first clients where the library was someone else's database. the firefox-of-music slot was never refilled.

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