Songbird Music Player was among the most beloved Open Source project and it still is for many, except for Linux users. Songbird is still open source, but developers behind Songbird have decided to discontinue support for Linux and the concentrate on Mac and Windows versions of Songbird.

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.

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."

I had reviewed Songbird close to two years back , and at that time Songbird was impressive but was bug ridden, lacked important features and certain degree of polishing which was expected from an application intended to be used on Desktops.

Songbird is an opensource project focused on building a cross-platform audio station. Linux was at the heart of the project, but as you may know, the company behind the project recently decided to drop its support. The good news is that there are several very good audio players available for Linux.

"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.

Songbird is a cross-platform, Mozilla-based music player with high ambitions. The app is still undergoing heavy development, but it has come a long way since we looked at the 0.1 release in 2006. Songbird today can sing a pretty sweet tune, but to push its way into the big leagues, it needs to get over its own interface.

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.

Songbird, the popular open source cross platform music player, has decided to dump support for Linux. Such a move could be fatal and here's why.