Let other programs use Songbird for their own Librarys.

Hey Laura,

I'm honestly not qualified to judge if it would be better as a plugin or a core component. But... if I could make a *radical* departure... I'd kinda like to see a *server* version of Songbird. (Queue dramatic music and thunderclap)

Stay with me here...

My current setup in my house consists of more then a few computers/media players, sometimes run by different people. For each one of those I'll have to get either Songbird or the media software to load up the music I have on my server, then have to figure out a way to get all the work I've put into song ratings and playlists, tags, etc to these seperate machines. For Songbird, that might not be so hard as someone who knows what they're doing will at some point come up with a fix for that. However, what about other stuff like Boxee, for instance? Or those new TV's demoed at CES that run Yahoo widgets? Or even a videogame that allows you to play your own background music?

Wouldn't it be great if anything I could use to play music had *full* access to all the work I've already done?

To my knowledge, UPNP can share the actual files, but it's just a lump of data. But, say I got my new spiffy widget-running-TV and, loading up the Songbird applet, I type in "nest://wayne@myhomesongbirdserver/" and *BOOM* I got it all. I queue up my smart playlist of 60's Jazz and listen to a few tunes. This updates the playcounts and dates on each song on the server, which in turn updates my playlist of songs I haven't listen to in a while which then gets reflected in my iPod the next time I sync it.

Isn't that cool?

Or.... I tag songs with "Music to Frag By" (Yeah, I know tags aren't in just yet.) and in my updated copy of QuakeWorld I can type in "nest://wayne@myhomesongbirdserver/" and while I'm playing - QuakeWorld might be actually playing the music, but Songbird is doing the music management on it's end.

Essentually, any media interface that plays music could benefit from Songbird by putting metadata and playlists that already exist to work for them.

It doesn't *have* to be a specific server version of Songbird but a gui-less version for a server (Windows Home Server plugin??) might be able to run as a service for those families which only have one computer.

Always remember, I'm exceptionally lazy. Anything I do once, I don't want to do a second time. And even the things I do once, I don't really want to do them.

Did this make things any clearer? Ottawa is in the midst of a bus drivers strike and I'm losing sleep from having to get up so early to carpool downtown so it's quite possible that I'm a little incoherent. :)

I have the same exact setup, many computers (laptops, Windows mobile, home server, and more importantly media center) after installing windows 7 today on the media center i felt like all my work was lost.

What work?
All the ratings, organizing and making play lists from my music collection. The golden question i have (with so many computers) how do i share everything but keep all the data/settings the same?

Today my brother came over with his laptop and wanted a couple of play lists from my computer. Today my wife wanted to listen to this "new" album i bought (on my computer).

how do i share everything but keep all the data/settings the same?

While I agree with all your concerns, I do have a question. Would this require Songbird to be running on the server? To me it sounds like yes it would, which means its just like iTunes on the AppleTV. This is the worst thing about the AppleTV.

I should not have to have any other software running in order for Boxee to work. The only requirement should be that the source is powered on. I currently have Boxee connected to my server and its great that I can play all my movies and shows off that without having any other application or processes running. Personally, I think if Boxee could read the M3U's/XML playlists, that would be the best way to go. This way Boxee is just reading the files. It would actually be better maybe if that info (play count, ratings etc...) could be written to the actual file itself.. or better yet, this information could be stored on the cloud! Yeah... actually that would probably be the best way to do it no? If you could create a songbird account that kept record of ratings, play count, playlists, etc... and this information could be saved on your computer but synchronized with the server. This way everything is stored on the cloud (and your computer too so you don't require a connection) but when you tried to access it from Boxee or another computer it would still have access to this data, just through the Internet as opposed to your LAN.

I hope I'm making sense... One things for sure, Pandora is a great addition, but Boxee really needs to work on their music player and the way they recognize music. to be honest I probably won't use a songbird app if they can just get this and playlists to work...

Btw, I havent used Songbird yet, but I've been watching it and I think I'm going to install it soon. It looks great and I hate iTunes and how locked down apple is to themselves, they're going to become what Microsoft is today, just more fashionable

Well, the way I originally saw this was having a separate Songbird app running for something like Boxee to poll in realtime.

But, there's no reason why a larger media app like Boxee couldn't sync with Songbird sporadically. I've written a little about Songbird being able to sync with other copies of itself for laptops or just multiple computers: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t... (That's another Songbird page. ;)

My biggest concern is to reduce the amount of duplication. If I'm putting a lot of work into my Songbird library, I don't want to have to do the same tasks for Boxee or anything else that I'd be playing music on.

you're absolutely right, but like the example I made before about the AppleTV and iTunes, I hate it when software depends on a remote application to run. I don't like having to get up off the couch to go to the server and turn on iTunes so that the AppleTV will work (one of the great benefits of having Boxee installed is I don't have to do this anymore).

Thats why if all the information like ratings and play count and stuff were to be stored on the cloud, then your computer, your laptop, Boxee, your phone, or any device would have access to that information as long as your connected to the Internet. So I guess in my scenario you are dependent on the Internet as opposed to a separate app.

I like your idea, but I'm trying to develop it further, because by what your saying you would actually need to download Songbird on each device, but does it necessarily need to be installed there? I'm not sure how this would be done, but I feel like the dependency can be taken away somehow

I was thinking more along the lines of running Songbird on your PC which you could sit at and modify playlists, ratings, sync your iPod, etc and then that Songbird could sync itself with whatever device is running Boxee (or other app) so there would only be one Songbird installed (unless you had a need for more).

That being said, the "cloud model" could allow for a lot of extra benefits. If you had the meta data for every track of every Songbird user, what could you extract from that?

Another thread was discussing having Songbird use an external source to set ratings for unrated tracks.

http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

If there was a cloud which could average the collected ratings of everyone, you could set a base for every track you have without having to go through it all yourself. (And with 17,000+ tracks, that could be a bonus.)

For those that are interested, and up to the task, Boxee is having a App Dev Challenge - build something cool and win stuff.

http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/05/05/annou...

Right away, comment #2 is about a way to get playlists into Boxee. (Hint, hint.)

Who couldn't use a little fame and fortune?

Hi All

New to Songbird, played with it yesterday & today. Initially, I was very impressed, and thought "Thank goodness for Songbird, now I can at last throw away iTunes, which since release 8 at least has forgotten all about QUALITY" - iTunes 9 is SO dire - it's unusable on any of my PCs, continually hanging and freezing.

Songbird, compared to that bloatware is a piece of fresh air!

BUT, then I went to switch on my Squeezebox...
... and of course, it's set to pick up my iTunes Library :-(

So I agree with everyone that wants to make everything work with everything - as has been said, this is 2009 after all...

.. but for starters, could we at least have the functionality to specify where the Songbird library is stored: my iTunes library is on my NAS, so every PC in the house (and the Squeezeboxes) can all point to the one music store - if all my PCs could be pointed to the NAS Songbird, I'd wait for Squeezebox to catch up!