New Songbird developer preview has DRM support (yay?)

Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Open Source

New Songbird developer preview has DRM support (yay?)

by Brad Linder Mar 2nd 2007

There's a whole flock of programs out there for playing and managing your music collections. But Songbird stands out as an open-source program based on Mozilla.

Version 0.2.5 is still a long way from version 1.0, but there's a whole slew of improvements in the latest release.

Support for playback of Windows Media and Quicktime files with DRM
USB mass storage evice
iPod device
Web library that includes a filterable list of all the MP3 files you've seen while surfing
Fullscreen video in Linux
And a slew of bug fixes

I guess support for playback of files with DRM is a necessity in this day and age, especially if you want to use Songbird's feature to import an iTunes library. But I usually like to keep my open-source programs and my DRM separate. You know, by not using anything with DRM at all.
Songbird is still a bit of a memory hog, but it should run pretty well on most modern machines. It may not be ready for primetime yet, but it's getting closer with every release.

[via digg]

Tags: drm, songbird

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Nicole said 7:10PM on 3-02-2007

Brad,

Of course, it would be better if there was no DRM to worry about. But, sicne a lot of have DRM-ed music, supporting it in Songbird is the only way to make it a real competitor. I, for example, haven't tried it until now. But since it will now play my purchased iTunes, I will give it a shot.

Who knows if this DRM thing will burn out. There's obviously been a lot of anti- sentiment on the blogs lately (even by musicians: http://advancedmediacommittee.typepad.com/emmyadvancedmedia/2007/02/the_other_digit.html ) but I just can't see it going away. Thus, I am glad Songbird will accomodate it.

For now...

- Nicole

Jason Kratz said 9:09PM on 3-08-2007

As someone who just got burned by iTunes when trying to move my library to an install of Vista and who has purchased tracks from the iTunes store I am more than happy that Songbird supports FairPlay and WMA tracks. Its the only really viable option out there. MediaMonkey doesn't even play non-DRM AAC without a plugin (and doesn't handle tagging at all even with the plugin). JaJuk is just too ugly (and doesnt play FairPlay tracks).

You said:
"But I usually like to keep my open-source programs and my DRM separate. You know, by not using anything with DRM at all."

Good for you. However not all of us share your opinion and I'm glad the Songbird team doesn't otherwise I wouldn't have any option other than iTunes.

Jason

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