Ajax Girl

Brian Dillard has a great write-up about the newest release of Songbird, the Mozilla-based platform for building Web media mash-ups:

If you’ve yet to experience Songbird, a little background is in order. The project is run by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a Bay Area company founded by veterans of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. Building on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform and the VLC media player, Songbird aims to unite a web browser, a media jukebox and an online media player into a skinnable, extensible, open-source application. At this stage, the app is a long way from challenging the likes of Windows Media Player, let alone iTunes. But as it grows, it promises to cultivate the same kind of fervent user and developer communities as Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects.

While Songbird has a desktop media player aspect to it, I think the biggest attraction to developers will be the rich JavaScript API which will allow you to build media mashups. Brian provided an interesting view of how he might leverage it:

As an Ajax developer and huge music nerd, I’m looking forward to playing with the JavaScript API. It promises seamless integration between webapps running in the Songbird browser and the media player itself. Imagine iTunes, but instead of a built-in browser that only supports the iTunes store, you’ve got a Firefox clone that plays well with music vendors, P2P networks, MP3 blogs and any other internet music resource

This looks to have huge potential and well worth investigating further. Brian said it best, “Why aren’t Ajax folks more geeked about “the Firefox of media players”?“

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/178327252/songbird-v03-api-for-media-mashups