Songbird, a new cross-platform media-playing application, always
promised Linux and the Songbird team has now delivered. What makes
Songbird different is that it provides one of the best-looking modern
desktop applications for Linux. Furthermore, Songbird plays your music
files, organizes your songs into playlists and connects to music stores,
all from within one really-good looking application.
Multimedia
support has always been one of the weaker areas of Linux, although you
can find plenty of other Linux music players including XMMS, Rhythmbox,
and Amarok. But, the Songbird team boasts a lot of industry support,
including former members of the Yahoo Music Engine, Nullsoft (of Winamp
fame), and Muse.Net teams.
Songbird plays files encoded in MP3,
AAC, OGG, FLAC, and WMA formats. Songbird, though, cannot play files
that have copy protection.
The Songbird team stands against music
piracy, but also supports the DigitalConsumer organization and its Bill of
Rights. The Songbird team also tells T-Shirts and places its logo in
more locations than you can count on their Web site.
You can skin
Songbird, or add another look to the user interface. On Windows, the
Winamp application really popularized this fun technique to make your
music player your own. In addition, since Songbird is built on top of a
Web browser platform, you can use Songbird to browse Web pages. Even
better, Songbird can detect links to music files on Web pages, which
essentially turns Web pages into music playlists.
Songbird follows
a recent trend towards creating applications on top of the Mozilla
programming platform. Like Firefox and Thunderbird, Songbird uses the
Mozilla programming libraries and XULRunner engine to create a new
Mozilla-based application. The real advantage to this is that since
Mozilla applications like the Firefox Web browser
and Thunderbird e-mail program run on many operating
systems, the Mozilla programming platform has already taken care of most
of the yucky issues faced when supporting multiple operating
systems.
The underlying technology, called XULRunner, allows you
to deploy Mozilla-based applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
You can find out more about using the Mozilla programming platform here at
Toolkit_API and here, with a broad overview here.
In
addition to Songbird, another more recent player in the cross-platform
music arena is ajaxTunes, a Web-based
music application. With ajaxTunes, you get a small-size music player
that runs well on most platforms. Despite the name, which implies
JavaScript, ajaxTunes is based on Macromedia Flash. When you click on an
ajaxTunes link in a browser a small music player window pops up,
allowing you to control the music.
As a music player, ajaxTunes is
intended to stream music from a server to your desktop. To get ajaxTunes
to play local files, you need to
create a custom URL in a Web page. You can also customize a
playlist, using playlists formatted in the emerging standard XSPF.
Part of
an interconnected set of companies such as Ajax 13 and the MP3 Tunes music store and online
music service, the ajaxTunes player forms the basis of the Oboe music
locker, the main offering from mp3tunes.com. Since the Oboe music player
is based on the same technology as ajaxTunes, this can be confusing. For
the most part, the Oboe music player exists to play music stored in
lockers on mp3tunes.com. The ajaxTunes music player was designed to
extend this idea to play music stored on any server.
And, you can
even download a version of the Oboe music player
for the small Linux-based Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.
These
applications help to usher in a Web-based era where you can run
applications from Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, or most any operating
system. -- Eric Foster-Johnson
