Songbird Lands Deal With Philips

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Rahim

Married!
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 partnership between Philips and Songbird back in September, but details were vague at that point.

Songbird will be releasing a Philips-branded version of its software with a few key differences, most important of which will be the application’s native support for each GoGear device. While Songbird offers support for some portable music devices (they recently upgraded their support last week), the experience for users isn’t always as seamless as they typically get from the ubiquitous iPod/iTunes combo. The Philips-branded version of Songbird will be custom tailored for the GoGear devices, which means it will recognize exactly which device you plug in and which features that device supports (the same way iTunes knows if you plug in a Nano vs an iPhone). The application can be used for song purchases and playlist management, as well as firmware updates.

The Songbird software will come as a self-extracting install with some devices (you plug the device into your computer and it will install onto your Windows machine automatically). For other products it will ship on a disk, or users will be directed to download the software from a website. The Philips-branded software is only available on Windows for now, but Macintosh support is in the works. The Philips devices should still be usable using the standard Songbird application on the Mac, but you won’t be able to install firmware updates.

This is a big win for Songbird. The company had a very rough 2009, which included the departure of the company’s founding CEO Rob Lord and a struggle to raise new funding to remain afloat (though it eventually did complete a round at a significantly lowered valuation). Songbird’s core product, which offers song management alongside a deeper integration with web services than iTunes does, remains the same, but it’s now targeting a broader audience than it was before.

The partnership with Philips is Songbird’s first major step in this area. And we’ll likely see more deals like this as Songbird tries to to appeal to electronics manufacturers as a content manager that isn’t owned by Apple.

Songbird isn’t alone in this space though — another impressive product looking to offer an alternative to iTunes is doubleTwist.

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I dont know what to make out of this deal.:???:
Economic Times too reported this deal a couple of days ago.
 
This is actually a big win for opensource media players.

Due to songbird's open architecture, if more and more PMP manufacturers sign up with it, it will mean that their PMP integration modules become easily accessible to all programmers via songbird source code. And since songbird runs on many platforms, it will ensure that the PMPs are supported on every computer, regardless of OS.

I wish Cowon and Archos, the two most FOSS-friendly PMP manufacturers (Cowon supports formats like vorbis and flac while Archos has an Android based PMP) have official tie-ups with songbird too. That would end iPod's monopoly.

As far as linux support is concerned, it ALREADY supports and works on linux but the philips deal means a more seamless experience for GoGear products, which should only take a plugin.
 

Liverpool_fan

Sami Hyypiä, LFC legend
As far as linux support is concerned, it ALREADY supports and works on linux..
No lad it doesn't
*linux.slashdot.org/story/10/04/04/1244244/Songbird-Drops-Linux-Support?from=rss

Anyway you are right in the second part (somewhat) since potential the PMP modules become accessible to other programmers but I am not sure to be very honest.
 

infra_red_dude

Wire muncher!
Nice to hear about Songbird. Hope something materializes.

[Offtopic]

I wish Cowon and Archos, the two most FOSS-friendly PMP manufacturers
Archos has the worst implementation of Android on any PMP. It is very buggy and has the ugliest Android interface.

On top of that there are no good free and worthy apps for Archos. It's implementation is the most "closed"; worser than Apple's.

[/Offtopic]
 
you've come out of hibernation. :p
WTF ? Been outta touch with songbird since its 0.1 alpha days :))
But still... the libraries can be accessed even now. So the basic idea of my statement should hold true... :?
Nice to hear about Songbird. Hope something materializes.

[Offtopic]


Archos has the worst implementation of Android on any PMP. It is very buggy and has the ugliest Android interface.

On top of that there are no good free and worthy apps for Archos. It's implementation is the most "closed"; worser than Apple's.

[/Offtopic]
[offtopic]
Seriously ? And to think that I was saving up for it...
Is there any hack to put a vanilla android inside it ? :D
[/offtopic]
 

infra_red_dude

Wire muncher!
WTF ? Been outta touch with songbird since its 0.1 alpha days :))
But still... the libraries can be accessed even now. So the basic idea of my statement should hold true... :?

[offtopic]
Seriously ? And to think that I was saving up for it...
Is there any hack to put a vanilla android inside it ? :D
[/offtopic]
I wouldn't suggest anybody to buy Archos now. Wait for the Android to mature and for it to open up the App store. It's not worth it now!
 
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