Songbird, the open source iTunes alternative (which we reported on earlier), has landed a big deal with Philips. The Dutch electronics manufacturer will bundle Songbird with its GoGear line of .mp3 players as the music management and sync tool. While this is good news for Songbird, there are is a catch.
Philips will indeed bundle songbird with its GoGear .mp3 players, but it won’t be a vanilla installation (where does that expression come from, anyway?). It will be Philips-branded, which is understandable, but it will have exclusive features like firmware upgrading that won’t be in the regular Songbird release. The regular Songbird will also work with the GoGear devices, but you won’t get firmware upgrading. In addition, Philips’ version is Windows-only for now, with a Mac variant in the works.
I’d say it would’ve been better if Philips donated the code and specifications to Songbird, so that the original developers can integrate it. Songbird could create a Device Stage-like experience within their application for third parties to latch on to. This would prevent fragmentation, while still allowing companies to shove their brands in our faces.
Those are niggles, though. This is good news for Songbird, and hopefully other manufacturers will follow. Google, Nokia, Palm – pay attention.
“Our partnership with Philips is a great step for us – it drives distribution, revenue, and an even tighter connection to the CE side of the world. Of course the partnership means more features to consider and trade-offs to balance – but in this case, that’s a great problem to have,” the Songbird team writes, “There is lots of overlap in desired features from both sides, so this probably means you’ll see some things accelerated, which is good news for all Songbird consumers.
I personally never understood why functionality like this couldn’t be built into the file manager, so you wouldn’t need a bloated and slow music management application. In my ideal world, devices like .mp3 players would follow a standard, where a simple sync button would appear within the file manager. The file manager would be metadata-aware, so you could just select the albums/songs you’d want transferred to your device, press sync, et voilà .
In a sane world, we wouldn’t need stuff like iTunes. In a sane world, operating systems would be designed properly to handle situations like this.
Philips To Bundle Songbird with Music Players
Yuck.
It’s stupid to leave the firmware updating part as closed-source. What do they expect to gain from it?
If they had opened it up they’d have loads of people at their hands who could keep it up-to-date and fix bugs if there appears such. Now they have to do it themselves, and given their track record they probably won’t be updating their version of Songbird too often.
it costs money to open source it and since they don’t expect benefit from doing so, they expect to gain not spending that money
I’m not sure how that would be better, Thom. I think music management is analogous to photo management. A file manager can do it, but the things people are looking to do with music really aren’t the same as what they are trying to do with their Word Documents or source code files.
Photos should be managed by the file manager too. All operations you do in a photo manager can easily be done inside the file manager (crop/resize/rotate/red eye/etc.). Implement a decent plugin system and rare functionality can be implemented too.
I hate how everything it tucked away in bloated programs which use databases and generally look completely out of place with the rest.
I do all my management inside the file manager; photos, films, TV series, music.
So do I. I absolutely *hate* syncing, or organizing through some third party app. Though i can certainly see that some people may prefer, say iPhoto, iTunes (or what have you), i beg all developers of the world to pay attention and realize that there are more than one type of people in the world and make these things optional!
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Well, I second that. However, mainstream OS’es are not Haiku/Syllable/SkyOS (unfortunately).
OTOH, one could pull off something like that through shell plugins (at least in Windows) – but “decent plugin system” isn’t exactly the term, I’d use about that.
I’ve not yet found a file manager that can query media databases and mass update/rename my music files. Even with extra utilities, it’s not the same as telling Media Monkey or Amarok to update metadata and rename/move files based on it.
With my photos, I need jhead to do renaming based on metadata but this isn’t recursive so it’s a directory by directory plod. I’ve also not found something that searched for duplicate images. I’ve seen apps that find duplicates provided the are the same image/size but named differently. What I want is something that will find different sizes of the same image content so I can kill the smaller.
In terms of managing the movement of files from drive to device, the file manager is perfect. Flashdrive mp3 players beat “media manager” paired devices hands down. What I’d like to see is the manager included sync function as an additional option to managing the files directly through a file manager rather then the requirement to pair with a specific manager.
Again, the posters on this site view the world from a geek’s perspective – you wouldn’t be posting here if if didn’t have at least some IT background. From an every day user’s perspective using a file manager to do this stuff is a nightmare.
I am addressing a situation with a client at the moment where employees – real estate agents – are taking anything from 50 to 150 photos of a property – of which they use 10 to 15 – yet are keeping not only the original high res versions of all 150 but are then, through lack of any understanding of how this stuff works, creating duplicates of the entire folder in lower resolutions for using on web sites. Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the storage implications of this – especially when doing remote backups. THIS is the level of user mainstream OSes have to support, so yes it does mean that in many things we get the dumbed down version.
Some will say this is a training issue. Anyone who has had any experience working with teachers will know that you can do all the training you like, if they don’t want to learn – or think it isn’t something they need to know – it just goes in one ear, does a quick lap around the block and swiftly exits on the other side.
While I agree that for MY purposes and YOUR purposes such things may be a godsend, for the common user and the poor suffering techs who have to support them, they would be an absolute bloody nightmare. And it is that common user that the mainstream OS developers have to think about. If you want File Manager based management of this stuff I’m sure you could do some research and find an OS that does it, but don’t hold your breath for it to come to anything that is mainstream.
In my Windows days, acdsee was a fantastic blend of file manager and media manager. If you can find it, look at acdsee “classic” as the version after that started adding in extra crap.
Your point about media managers for common users is also why I suggested it’s ability to sync content (in my case focusing on music) in addition to providing a simply mounted drive view.
I also think the challenge for average users learning the file manager is generally overstated though. Windows file manager isn’t that complicated to use and provides a clear icon view as does the osX file manager and various X DE managers. You can spend a day training them on a specific type of media manager or you can spend a day training them on the file manager which allows them much more than just the limited media type. It’s the same with any other program, the user who opens Word then goes looking for there .doc is not nearly as effective as the user who opens file explorer and sees all relevant files grouped together within a project related directory; open the file, let the system deal with feeding it to the right application.
I do get grief with teaching average users though too. In my case, we can train them to better use the Windows file explorer and a rational directory structure or we can spend an absurd amount of money on implementation and training for a full CRM system.
(I’m not a professional F1 race driver, but I am required to have a minimum understanding of how to start a car and steer down the street.)
(edit): I meant to repeat the original suggestion – by all means, allow the media manager to sync content. But, do this as an added layer on top of allowing users to manage files directly through the file system. This way, one can work as they like and no one is forced to use a specific proprietary app.
Edited 2010-01-09 22:53 UTC
And if you want a particular photo or song to appear in numerous lists? You create shortcuts or duplicate them? If you create shortcuts and want to copy that list to a device does the OS copy the shortcuts or should it just know that it needs to copy the original at that time? How does it differentiate between an external backup hard disk and your mp3 player that just mounts as a disk, or should it know about every type of mp3 player out there? What about the meta information about photos, music, movies, TV shows etc? Should the OS be able to handle that and show it – even allow it to be edited – in a meaningful way? How would these proposed plugins be implemented? Should all plugins be cross-platform? Wouldn’t that then make them bloated?
And why stop there? Surely if everyone used an open document format you should just be able to edit a web page or spreadsheet or anything just from the file manager – after all they’re only files too right?
I have no doubt it would be a piece of cake for Apple to integrate the functionality of the iLife suite and even the iWork suite into the “File Manager”, and probably not too difficult for Microsoft with their offerings, but if they did I can guarantee there would be more than one punter who’d be screaming monopoly. And I doubt anyone would want to go through the painful process of updates and bug fixes for components they don’t even use, because if its all integrated…
Most of your complaints were already addressed by BeOS. Custom lists? They’re called queries, can be made permanent, and update instantly (as in, no delay). Of course, queries in BeOS were extremely powerful, and the UI could be a little overwhelming if you tried to dive too deep into the possibilities.
However, it could be made easier using something like drag and drop – what you use in iPhoto too, now. Instead of creating a query by specifying conditions, you could let the operating system define the conditions based on the files dropped into the query.
Sure, this wouldn’t be easy to make, but most certainly not impossible.
While you call us geeks, I call you limited by what you see aorund you today. Dare to think beyond what you have now, and look at your computer as something that can make your life easier.
Right now, Microsoft, Apple, and the open source world do very little to make your computer work for you instead of against you. BFS-like queries are a magical ingredient which has never been used to its fullest potential (see my idea of using them to manage applications).
Why not? Why should I have to open Word in its entirety if I spot a spelling mistake in the file preview? This makes absolutely no sense to me, and is a classic example of developers NOT making life easier for us.
So yes, it should be possible to perform basic editing functions for word processor documents straight from the file manager. In fact, I’m annoyed that we STILL, in 2010, do NOT have this functionality.
Thom, I actively develop both applications and procedures to make life easier for my client’s businesses, working with a lot of people and a lot of technologies in the process, thus having an understanding of exactly what the marketplace is dealing with. I have been doing this for over 20 years, adopting new useful technologies, on multiple platforms, as they become available. What’s your expertise in this area?
And I can absolutely guarantee I spend a LOT less time “managing” my file system than you do yet my filesystem is very clean and tidy. I use tools that do it for me – very efficiently, and without me having to put any effort into it. That doesn’t mean I am 100% happy with the current model, but I see significant benefits in it that aren’t there in manual methods, and it’s certainly much more duplicable. So until something better comes along that is simple enough for the masses that I have to work with to understand, I’m very happy to use it.
I also find it incredible that someone like you who is always crying about monopolies and even in this article about bloated software would suggest that the OS vendors should push even more developers out of the market by building additional functionality into their OSes, some of which would not be used by very large segments of the market, and by doing so make the OSes even more bloated than they currently are.
And in all of this we haven’t even touched on the security implications of just being able to plug a device in and access all the crud on it…
That was actually one of the reasons I switched away from Linux. I got tired of manually organizing my photos and iPhoto offered a better (and, at the time, mostly unchallenged) way to do things.
The trouble is the file manager cannot have an interface specialized to photo management unless it has some kind of OLE/KParts type system where it is only a container for various component applications whose UIs it continuously morphs into. But, if iPhoto embedded into a Finder window, I don’t see how that would benefit the average user to any significant degree.
Personally, I’d prefer one good tool for each job that integrates beautifully with its siblings rather than one mediocre tool for all jobs. Contrary, say, to the attempt to make Konqueror everything in KDE, I think the project was smart to realize the need for a lightweight file manager separate from the web browser so each can be tailored to its own task.
As to music, I’d rather not have to manually create and change the folder structure.
Of course, I also regret the disappearance of spatial file management from the mainstream.
Kill me if that ever happens. I already have emacs on my machine. I don’t need another programs that does EVERYTHING.
Just because you do all of your management inside a file manager doesn’t mean that everybody else wants to. I would rather not bloat up my file manager with all kinds of whiz-bang features.
Edited 2010-01-10 14:19 UTC
One the one hand, I strongly disagree with you about using the file manager to view and manipulate documents. A file manager that also tries to perform lots of tasks specific to given document types will quickly become the most slow and bloated bit of software on your computer. I’d prefer that my file manager just manage my files, and leave actually using/manipulating the contents of those files to applications that are actually good at it.
Urgh, the idea of a file manager that’s also trying to be a document viewer, music player and photo-editor, among God knows what else… is truly, truly cringe-worthy. Konqueror was trying to do that, and I freaking hated Konqueror for it.
But, specifically, for the task of moving media onto media players… that probably is a job for a file manager, as it involves moving your files between devices. And actually, on some platforms, with some devices, you can just use your file manager (my iRiver, for instance). The reason you can’t just use your file manager with many media players has much, much more to do with the distributors of those players wanting to lock you into their platform and control your use of the device than any deficiency in the host OS or flaw in its design.
The file manager concept as we know it from Windows, Mac and most other contemporary OSes, are closing in fast on its best before date.
They reminds me of the time when you located your favourite web page by finding it in Yahoos tree.
As we store more and more information on our computers, structural retrieval is becoming harder and harder.
Today we google or bing for files on the internet, why not have similar solutions for our hard drives.
It should be possible to add an arbitrary amount of meta data to each file. This meta data could be added manually or autmagically, e.g. if we get a file by mail the system should add metadata carrying information on from whom we got it. If we send a file to somebody by e-mail the file should know that too, If it is a webpage, it should know what other pages it links to or from. If it is photos facial recognition software could try to put names to the person on the picture, provided we once had given it a picture of that person and specified a name manually. For songs there are services on the internet that can tell you who wrote it or who sings, that kinds of services could be integrated to create meta data, statistics and rule based systems could be used to provide meta data that could answer question like: Give me that sales forecast for customer X in project Y two weeks ago.
The problem is to get good configurable user interfaces. For common tasks like photo and music management most file managers could have default views that the user to easily could modify if needed.
In other words file managers, should be more like music managers or photo managers, not the other way round.
In a way I agree: the system should automatically add metadata to files, anything that could prove useful sooner or later, and should have a system for “plugins” that extract even more metadata for certain types of files, for example in the case of images a plugin registered only for image data could try and recognize the people in the picture.
But that raises an obvious privacy concern: how much of the metadata should be visible and accessible to other users of the computer? And how much of it all should be sent along when you f.ex. compose an email and make an attachement?
Profound post, and point that I very much agree with.
In my ideal world, there would be no file manager at all. A file manager can never be as good as my Amarok when managing music.
I’d like to see more powerfull specific-usecase-applications. like better music/photo/video/book/etc managers.
Anyway, i consider that good news. I guess we’ll see more of that in future. I’d personally love to have my Amarok-based music-player.
Like this? http://camendesign.com/krocos I think Thom is right that this is the file manager’s job and not for a monolithic bloated app.
As for the article, I asked Thom to write it up because I had nothing positive at all to say about it (I got slated for my negative review of Songbird 1.0). The fact it’s Songbird under the hood makes no difference—this just reeks of yet another piece of crapware bundled with a crap MP3 player.
This isn’t competing—it’s taking a crap on people’s harddrives.
It makes me want to bang my head on the desk with just how much Philips does. not. get. it.
And shame on you Songbird—where the f*ck are your balls? You tell Philips to show you the code or take a hike—there’s other free software players Philips can leech off of. You contribute, or you go elsewhere.
I had to downgrade from 1.4 back to 1.2 because the new skin is so awful on the Mac and because metadata editing stopped working. Songbird is a piece of crap, and I stand by my original review. It has no hope, and no clue.
haha “songbird is a piece of crap”
I like you son
hell you can f–k my girlfriend
I’ll admit I didn’t like your initial review. I thought it would get better. It hasn’t. Its slow, not very smart, focused on appearance rather than performance, a bad memory hog. I’ve stopped using it.
The one thing I do like, and would love to see in another media player is the general (default basic UI design). I like the old Music match library/playlist interface. I spent a day or two kicking around the source, trying to make a small, small change to it. The xul nature of its UI, makes everything more difficult than it should be for the sake of ui flexibility. I know some people obviously love xul, its just not my preference.
You could’ve downloaded the Gonzo 2.0 feather/skin to get your old look back.
Still, I wonder if Songbird needs better developers. It constantly seems like they’re taking two steps forward and two steps back.
They started with a browser/music player years ago but have failed to optimise the music side of things so badly that it routinely hangs on clicking something, after taking an eternity to launch in the first place. It’s better than it was, but that was a low benchmark.
They’re continually rewriting things like the theming system but never meeting what’s on the roadmap, and releasing versions where the only major new features are Windows-only.
At the same time, features have a habit of disappearing (like watch folders which disappeared for a year or two). I just noticed that the browser bizarrely no longer does bookmarks (there is an add-on though) That shouldn’t happen!
On the other hand, a music player with a browser and Songbird’s large collection of add-ons is an amazing thing. It’s frustrating that they can’t get the thing to launch quickly, scroll through some tracks and play some music without hanging for 10 seconds.
I really hope they can sort themselves out, but that depends more on whether the competition gives them the time. With time, I’m sure they will, but I reckon a bunch of talented developers would run circles around Songbird by using QT & WebKit.
In other words, your filesystem would look like a tornado went through it, with random audio and video files everywhere, dumped in random (and/or mostly one) folder/directory. And you would make a media player application handle it all in some massive databases? In terms of efficiency and cleanliness, that sounds downright disgusting.
I’m glad I don’t live in your ideal world. I like metadata such as audio file tags for certain information, but would *not* want to rely on it for organizing my files. That’s what the file system is for–organizing files. I use such tags solely for more information on the song being played and the others in my playlist–and that’s how it will likely always be. My hard drive’s nice and cleanly organized.
You’re forgetting the vertical labels. His file names would be vertical.
Amarok shall forever burn in hell for having (had) vertical tabs
Edited 2010-01-09 22:18 UTC
given that they are gone, I think you should let that one go
Well, Amarok organizes my music files so clean. They are in a very well structured directories like ~/media/music/R/Radiohead/In Rainbows/01-15 steps.ogg
That was what sold me on it and Mediamonkey. I tried iTunes when I was looking at the time but it didn’t allow the user to specify how directory structure and files where named. The iTunes library is a mashed mess on the hard drive that pretty much screws you for using anything but iTunes media management.
In today’s short sighted business management, sane isn’t “competitive”. It’s all about whatever drives a short term profit spike for the manager before they get premonition or move on (leaving the resulting mess behind).
In a sane world, industry standards would be preferred over hardware specific drivers. Where drivers where needed, source or interface specs would be released for all platform developers to adopt. Actually, when I was still buying mp3 players, the first requirement was a flashdrive mode; no platform dependencies.. just let it appear as a removable drive so I can copy my music too it and go. Dealing with my first mp3 player and specialty media manager app was what solidified this for me. Even now, my omni-gadget can provide a flashdrive mode if needed though a simple rsync/ssh works just as well.
Yes, madness that this limitations are imposed on the technology but give business need for short term profits and consumer need for purchase of blinky lights with minimum thought, this is the technology market rational thought must contend with.
I have a strong feeling Apple will get jealous and will threaten Philips with a law suite and force them, somehow to link iTunes into the game.
Thanks GOD I am not a pop-music person otherwise I would be trapped in DRM and be forced to use services such as iTunes. Fortunately my music style is electronic so I get all my music from Beatport. HQ + DRM free.
Edited 2010-01-09 22:40 UTC
Hasn’t iTunes music been DRM free since Mr Jobs finally convinced RIA (I’m thinking the open letter to media content companies). Movies and books are another story but you shouldn’t be seeing DRM in your iTunes purchased music and definitely not in your existing and imported music files.
How the heck do you get that? That’s like saying Microsoft is going sue Apple and force them to include Windows with Macs…
Um… iTunes hasn’t had DRM on music for quite a while now, and their are other services such as Amazon MP3 that don’t use DRM and are less proprietary.
Congratulations to the Songbird team, Phillips made a great choice.
In a sane world, we wouldn’t need application package managers either. We could drag and drop application bundles like on a Mac. But this kind of thing is impossible with the way Linux distros (besides Gobo Linux) organize application libraries, binaries, and configuration in the filesystem.
But even if Linux WERE sane about the way apps were stored on disk, an application manager would still be useful since it would be a convenient UI that users could use to find trusted apps and (un)install with the click of a button. (Without the underlying crap, they’d just be more reliable. Don’t tell me you haven’t had Adept crash on you, leaving your system in an inconsistent state!)
People like to have specific apps for specific things. Windows 7 has built-in support for burning discs. Just insert the disc and drag and drop and then click Burn. Same thing on the Mac. But if it’s so convenient, why do people still want to use Nero? Because cognitively, it’s simpler. Most people don’t do well with loose semantics or layers of semantics or too many (intuitive or not) features in one facility. Instead, they like apps that do one thing and one thing well and make all the controls for that thing obvious.
This is why applications like iTunes (not that its UI is really any good) will never die. When you’re using iTunes, you’re thinking about managing your music. Not you files. You don’t have to know or care that songs are in files. (Imagine trying to manage your emails directly in the file manager!) Songs are songs with more metadata than a filename, and you want to drag and drop them as objects, because semantically that’s what they are. The fact that they’re stored in files is irrelevant. Integrating music management into Finder would be a nightmare, and it’s not clear to me where you’d put some features like the music store. In a separate app? Why then not make that app able to manage your music? Hence, iTunes. (I’m the kind of user who knows perfectly well how the music is stored, and I would have no technical difficulty dragging files to an MP3 player that appeared to be a USB drive. But I would hate that. I’d want an app that was intelligent about helping me manage my MUSIC. Remember, some people have tens of thousands of songs in their libraries. That requires some special tools.)
Scientists and engineers have produced massive volumes of research on usability, human computer interaction, cognitive systems engineering, ergonomics, and industrial design. It sure would be nice if more developers were to pay attention to it a bit more.
If you’re a kid growing up ( at least my experience in 1980’s USA), you want Ice cream. The last thing you want is plain vanilla. Vanilla Ice cream is the usual base of a good sundae, but what makes it great is everything else on it. Its a good mellow flavor that allows the topping flavors to shine. Most vanilla ice cream of the time was pretty mildly vanilla flavored. Now a days they have vanilla bean, or french vanilla which is a stronger vanilla taste.
okay you lost me at ice cream
People see vanilla = plain. Unaltered, no extras. Not modified by reseller before sale. No sprinkles, whipped cream, gummy bears, oreos, or cherries on top.
I bought a Philips mp3 player because they look like great bargains, and it worked fine for about 3 weeks and went dead. D-E-A-D. Like the battery had been removed; no response whatsoever. Their customer support was friendly but basically said ‘tough luck, Charlie’. They require the serial number to replace it, but the S/N on Philips players is so small it literally requires a microscope to be able to read it. And then I made the mistake of buying another Philips mp3 player; different model. I figured I couldn’t get 2 bad mp3 players in a row. The experience with the 2nd one was different, but just as unsatisfying. It plays radio fine, but no matter how closely I follow the instructions in the manual, it will not play mp3’s. Again, customer support was friendly but offered no useful assistance.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. There won’t be a third time, ever.
A filetype extension player sure sounds like a useless device. Is creating unneededly-tech-sounding-but-at-the-same-time-false expressions a new wave of IT blogging?
Edited 2010-01-10 07:11 UTC
.. which try to do everything just because it’s possible.
Nice post. Can’t agree more.
The branding thing may not bother to everyone using it direct from the included CD… and also would’t bother me if users can download the thing from the official program’s website and did have access to all features. The device-stage-like solution would be nice (even better would be some kind of standard to be followed by any program/OS)…
Also, using programs to sync these data and updating feels like using very old computers and their data ports… and standard, USB these days, cable AND interface and a file manager should be all you needed… (but probably old BeOS users would probably be the ones who really understand this concept…).
There is an open source multi platform file manager that may eventually provide some of the functionality of BFS queries without BFS. Right now Union directories are being integrated. I know because I’m programming it.
Sounds like a great idea; but the problem is that Philips MP3 players don’t have enough storage; I need at least 64GB minimum for the music I wish to carry and I’ve yet to see a Philips MP3 player being sold in New Zealand that I can use on a Mac and has that sort of capacity.
As for a claim that it ‘costs’ them opening up source code – how? how does it cost them money? all they need to do is disclose the protocol specifications (NOT source code, only specifications) so that support can be be added to Songbird by Philips and then maintained by the community once it is out side the scope Philips deems to it needs to support it for. If any, it’ll end up saving Philips money and customers will be happy that they choose when to upgrade rather than having to upgrade because the company removes support when a new operating system release comes out.
I’m a little curious about how you use your MP3 player: my iRiver has something like 8GB capacity, and I only really hit that limit when I start copying movies to it. There’s usually not nearly 8GB of music that I’d actually want to have available to pick from at any given time. (8GB gets me all my Fatboy Slim, TCM, Chemical Brothers, and Prodigy at least.) Are you using FLACs or some other lossles codec?
I have around 150GB of music with many that I am unwilling not to carry with me when I go out. I have alot of discographies; Nick Cave and the Bad seeds, The Smiths for example would end up using over half the space on your iriver. As for the ripping quality, I use XLD with AAC set at ‘True VBR’ with the quality rating at 100 (which is around 256).