Songbird media player: the love child of Mozilla and WinAmp

Songbird is an open source media client with tight web integration that is designed by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a San Francisco-based company whose previous efforts include WinAmp and the Yahoo Music Engine. Songbird is still in early stages of development, but is already quite usable on the desktop. Version 0.5 was released late last month with MTP device support and user interface improvements.

The Songbird developers aim to create an open ecosystem for media technologies that will liberate users from the closed end-to-end media solutions offered by Microsoft and Apple. The monolithic media architectures used by those companies, which tie music stores to specific software players and specific devices, have stifled creativity and innovation. Songbird gives users a way to escape from vendor lock-in and also creates the potential for more competition and innovation in media services and digital content distribution.