A Songbird is Hatched.

Boing Boing’s tech godess Xeni Jardin interviews ex-Winamp-er Rob Lord on and about the preview release of the SongBird media player in Songbird, the “open source iTunes killer,” flies today. Lots of interesting stuff there.

Back in November I wrote about The Songbird Media Player, built with XUL, DRM free. and what make its different.

of course everyone going to be comparing it to the 800 pound gorilla “iTunes”

They have come a long way, after a few delays, but it is looking good.

The SongBird nest site is being Slashdot’ed but the Boing Boing article points to some mirrors for getting the download. I hope to post more obsevation and puns when I have a chance and/or more awake.

Update: The Songbird Nest is backup.

Update: The Nest has published a road map which is promising, althought the 0.3 looks like a big and agressive list.

The feedback from the developer forums has been good, interesting and should be useful. For example ErikStaats pitching in the start of a ITunes Playlist Reader. The only worrying issue raised is about support of Unicode & umlauts outside of menus, but its hard to see if this a “uh oh” or a “just not finished yet” problem.

One of the possible very big ideas of Songbird is the plug-in services aspect, that would make it very flexible and dynamic. One thing already asked about is SongBird.(ing) from remote locations, i.e. connecting securely to my mp3 collection over the internet, which is already there in one form via Streampad. very useful and cool. (and will drive the copyright extremists crazy – bonus!)