My apologies for not posting in recent days; work has taken precedence. Here are two quick items to help fill the void for now: First, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the folks behind the open source media player Songbird, have just gotten $1M in venture funding. They’re also about to release version 0.2, but you knew that already, right?
Second, since this is Swindleeeee!!!!! we have to have an eMusic tie-in, and fortunately Erik Staats came through for us, announcing his new eMusic extension for Songbird. The extension eliminates the most annoying (at least to me) feature of the eMusic web site, namely that listening to the 30-second track samples requires launching an external application (in my case iTunes for OS X). The extension still has a few rough spots (as noted in my posts to the eMusic message board thread linked to earlier), but it’s definitely full of promise.
Altogether this is great news for people looking for alternatives not only only to the iTunes Store (in the form of our favorite music service) but to the iTunes application as well. Congratulations to the Songbird team and to Erik; I’m really looking forward to seeing these applications come together.
EverythingFusion (jadamshome@comcast.net) - 2006-12-21 06:09
“The extension eliminates the most annoying (at least to me) feature of the eMusic web site, namely that listening to the 30-second track samples requires launching an external application.” I’m glad it launches an external application. LaLa.com plays it iside the browser window using Javascript (ick!), with the result that: (1) I can’t tell which track of an album it’s playing at the moment; (2) there’s no way to skip one of the tracks; (3) have the time it simply doesn’t work.