Ian McKellar gave a presentation on the Songbird media player at LugRadio Live this past weekend. The talk introduced some of the underlying goals behind the Songbird project and included a demonstration of some of the core technologies in the Songbird media player.

Songbird is an open source media client with tight web integration that is designed by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a San Francisco-based company whose previous efforts include WinAmp and the Yahoo Music Engine. Songbird is still in early stages of development, but is already quite usable on the desktop. Version 0.5 was released late last month with MTP device support and user interface improvements.

The Songbird developers aim to create an open ecosystem for media technologies that will liberate users from the closed end-to-end media solutions offered by Microsoft and Apple. "There are a few major players in the market right now and the users are left out in the cold," said McKeller. "We need a way that we can build services to do exciting new media stuff, but built on open standards and built on open source—the stuff that empowers users and developers and builds better creativity."

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