January 5th, 2010

Songbird Lands Deal With Philips, To Come Bundled With Millions Of Portable MP3 Players

Don’t count Songbird out yet. The open source media player that’s increasingly positioning itself as an alternative to Apple’s iTunes has forged a deal with global electronics maker Philips. Under the agreement, which will be announced later today at CES, Songbird’s software will come bundled with the Philips line of GoGear portable music players, available worldwide. We first reported a… → Read More

December 28th, 2009

Songbird Still Airborne, Takes On iTunes With Improved Device Syncing

Music fans looking looking for an alternative to the iTunes/iPod ecosystem are getting a new option this week with the release of Songbird 1.4, which introduces support for CD ripping and syncing Mass Storage Class (MSC) Devices. The first feature is fairly self explanatory (and frankly I can’t believe it took this long to include), but it’s the latter that’s the most compelling: Songbird now… → Read More

September 8th, 2009

Pioneers Of The (Not So) Inevitable May Have New Legs For Songbird

Pioneers of the Inevitable, the company behind the open source Songbird music player, has had a tough year. Founding CEO Rob Lord left the company earlier this year after burning through $8 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Atlas Ventures. “We were left without a game plan,” said one person close to the company to me confidentially.

The company has struggled through, facing what… → Read More

December 2nd, 2008

Songbird Takes Flight With 1.0 Release

Songbird, the open-source, media focused web browser, has launched its 1.0 milestone release to the public. The browser, which we’ve covered extensively since it was first announced back in 2005, offers a number of features that make it an appealing alternative to music players like iTunes, including a feature called mashTape will automatically cull the internet for relevant content for each… → Read More

August 20th, 2008

Songbird Releases Beta of Web-Integrated Media Player

Later this evening Songbird, the open source web-integrated media player, will the unveil the .7 beta release of its software that introduces scrobbling to Last.fm, speedier track importing, and a more polished interface among a number of other features. The resulting application is a marked improvement over the last release we covered, but still has a few rough edges that continue to make it… → Read More

March 24th, 2008

Mixwit's Mixtapes and Broader Social Media Ambitions

Mixwit makes it easy to create embeddable mixtapes (otherwise known as custom playlists). We touched upon the company a couple weeks ago as part of our Y Combinator demo day roundup but never gave it our full treatment. A similarly-named service called Mixaloo serves up label-sanctioned tracks and requires users to buy them to hear more than 30-second previews. Mixwit differs by drawing its songs… → Read More

October 30th, 2007

Web-Integrated Media Player Songbird Releases v0.3

What do you get when you cross iTunes with a web browser? You get Songbird, an application built on top of Mozilla Firefox’s core technology that serves as a platform for media websites that want to integrate tightly with a desktop media player. We last wrote about Songbird over a year and a half ago when version 0.1 was released. Tonight, Songbird releases version 0.3, which the company… → Read More

February 7th, 2006

Songbird to Launch Tonight

Songbird, the eagerly anticipated new media browser and web player built on the Mozilla (Firefox) engine, will launch (for Windows) later tonight or this morning (unless it doesn’t, CEO Rob Lord tells me ). Mac and linux will come later. Exclusive screen shots are below. Since songbird is a web browser in addition to a media player, user will be able to browse web sites. If audio files are… → Read More

November 29th, 2005

More on Songbird

Songbird replaced its landing page with a blog and is giving more information on the product (I had next to no details for my original Songbird post earlier this month). The site now has additional screenshots and a few posts that begin to talk about the product. I am alpha testing Songbird now and am very impressed, even though they say it is only 30% done (as of November 18). They have asked me… → Read More

November 14th, 2005

Songbird

I just heard about songbird, which should be launching in December. I have very little information on it currently. Whatever it is (client? Web app?), it looks like a music/podcast player of some sort and it’s certainly visually appealing. More (perhaps) on this later. You can sign up for Songbird announcements here. → Read More