POTI, Creators of the Songbird Media Player, Call It Quits

ilikenwf writes "Pioneers of the Inevitable has announced on their blog that they will be folding on June 28. Started in 2007, the company went on to create the Songbird Desktop and mobile players, as well as the Songbird.me Facebook app. Their legacy lives on in Nightingale, an open source fork of the Songbird Desktop player that runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. No word yet on whether or not their currently closed source code will be opened up or not, but their contributions to the world of open source software are appreciated, and won't be forgotten."

Not unexpected

[jrohr]

since I first tested Songbird, I never felt that this would be able to become a success. It may have incorporated some interesting idea, but basing a media player on a heavyweight application such as Mozilla was a weird decision to start with. A media player should be fast, snappy and responsive, not take a minute to start.

Saddened, not surprised

[monzie]

Bit saddened about the demise of Songbird. It seems I'm one of the few people who not only liked using it but loved the fact that one could write extensions using the familar XUL stuff. ( i.e., If you know how to write Firefox extensions, you know how to write Songbird extensions - and all you need to know is JS, CSS and a bit of XML )

I think their initial idea was good, even laudable - build an open source media player and make it easy to write plugins. I guess they wanted to have an extension ecosystem just like Firefox's ( which arguably is the richest in the world amongst browsers )

I think it failed not because most people who want to listen to music aren't techies and they're happy ( and I'm talking about people using MS Windows on their computers ) with Windows Media Player , winamp or whatever else cool kids are using to play music these days ( I consider both Zune and iTunes to be way more bloated than needed )

I guess OSX users never typically use anything other than iTunes ( I myself didn't for the 4 years that I used OSX as my primary OS )and linux users went with Amarok ( good) or Rythmbox ( not so good) . I personally like the audacious music player.

There was no space left for Songbird - to distinguish itself - I wish it had been bundled with more linux distros. It used to do a good job at syncing Android phones - I wish more manufacturers had bundled it along with their 'phone software' ( I'm looking at you Samsung Kies, you abomination!)

RIP, Songbird.

Forgotten?

[c0lo]

but their contributions to the world of open source software are appreciated, and won't be forgotten.

While I appreciate a contribution to the opensource, to remember something one needs to know about it first.

~$ sudo apt-get install songbird
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package songbird

(translation: debian/ubuntu has nothing to remember).

Thought it died years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/04/04/1244244/songbird-drops-linux-support Surprised it lasted a few more years.