Songbird is a free and open source software audio player and web browser founded by Rob Lord and developed by Pioneers of the Inevitable , with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."

I'll start with a quote from the official Songbird homepage, which goes like 'Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players'. Although not (yet) as popular in the audio players world as Firefox is in the one of web browsers, Songbird looks and offers an interface which integrates both powerful browsing features and music collection management.

"This guide shows how to install the Songbird media player (0.3 Developer Pre-Release) on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop. Songbird is a free software audio player with media database capabilities written using XUL and VLC, with an interface similar to Apple's iTunes. From the Songbird web site: "Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web.

This document describes how to set up Songbird 0.5 on Ubuntu 8.04. Taken from the Songbird page: "Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet."

So Songbird, which is not even at version 1.0, would have its work cut out to rival those media players especially the ability to play video as well as music. But Songbird has one unique feature. It has a built-in browser, Mozilla, which allows it to extract maximum mileage from your music collection.

This news, posted to the official SongBird blog last Friday, came as a shocking slap in the face to someone who only recently freed his music library from the clutches of iTunes. Songbird was the logical choice to prepare for my eventual immersion in Linux, and now Songbird’s future on that OS is no more.

The first stable version of Songbird has been unleashed... One of the very first things to do after installing Songbird is to get and test-drive some of the available extensions. At the moment, there are probably hundreds of add-ons, so as a guide to new Songbird users, let me share to you a few of my favorites...

Songbird is a free opensource customizable media player and web browse powered by Mozilla. Songbird runs on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. On the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Songbird utilizes the VideoLAN Client for media playback.

Songbird is a media player built on Mozilla that is often described as the Firefox of media players because of the growing number of plugins and feathers (skins) that can be applied to the player.