On my list of “quality blog posts I may someday get around to writing”, is a com­par­ison of music playing soft­ware. I stormed out of iTunes a while ago and I’ve gone through a lot of pos­sible alter­na­tives in a search for a replace­ment (rea­sons for ditching iTunes and replace­ment I’ve set­tled on will be all be told in that much better post in the puta­tive future).

One tan­ta­lizing pos­si­bility is Songbird. Songbird is mostly from Rob Lord, a guy who is famous for building music players. (Remeber winamp? That guy. Well, the other that guy.) And man does the music-software-developing wisdom show. Never was a soft­ware treated to a more prac­ti­cally per­fect in every way man­date and devel­op­ment process. In addi­tion to being an aggres­sively open-source project spear­headed by a comfortably-funded team in a loft space, it’s built on the same plat­form as firefox, designed explic­itly to inter­op­erate with web2.0 stuff and is doc­u­mented drip by drip in a volu­mi­nous and artic­u­late blog.

The results so far are well… it’s a great devel­op­ment process. Trying to actu­ally run the thing is an exer­cise in patience more than music lis­tening, espe­cially if you’re packing a big music library. The code needs some tweaking, shall we say. And the fea­tures, they’re in planning.

But oh boy are they get­ting the UI down. And here’s the thing, despite still being at way-early-development stage 17 months after their first pre­view release, there is a super active user com­mu­nity. Users of what, I wonder? The thing’s prac­ti­cally vapor­ware. But people still flood them with thoughtful responses to every blog-request for com­ment on every nit­picking detail of UI pol­ishing. I guess they feel engaged. Open-source truly is a wonder.

We’re coming up on 2 years since they announced this thing. A dis­trib­uted team of pro­gram­mers has spent 2 years cranking on it. And it still won’t con­nect to an ipod without a 3^rd party exten­sion, burn a cd, or effi­ciently nav­i­gate a medium sized cat­alog of music. But nobody beats them at devel­op­ment process.