RSSNow that 7Digital supports US, Songbird can almost replace iTunes
By Tim Conneally | Published October 7, 2009, 4:57 PM
Online music store 7Digital officially gained support from all major labels in March of 2008, and has since enjoyed substantial growth by offering its platform as an API for developers to integrate into other services such as RIM's BlackBerry music download service and EMI's music discovery portal.
The store offers full DRM-free albums for $7.77 and single tracks for 77ยข, the service claims to have a library of over 6 million downloadable MP3s, encoded at 192 kbps and 320 kbps.
But one of the most exciting things about this release is 7Digital's inclusion in open source media management software Songbird. For music consumers who may not want to be tied to the ubiquitous Apple iTunes for managing their music and media content, Mozilla XULRunner-based Songbird has provided a robust alternative for a little more than two years. While enhanced by social Web plug-ins, the software really couldn't compete with iTunes because it lacked a native music store (and comprehensive PMP device support...but it actually supports a ton more hardware than iTunes!).
However, in March 2009, Songbird launched version 1.1.1 with the 7Digital music store built in. At the time, 7Digital CEO Ben Drury said, "7digital and Songbird is a killer combination for anyone who wants a dynamic, open music player. Songbird blows other media players away in terms of device support and extensibility and we're very excited to be partnering with them to allow users to buy, download, and transfer MP3s onto a multitude of devices. The Songbird Platform made it quick and easy to integrate 7digital into Songbird."
Unfortunately though, only UK users had complete access, so United States and European users had access to only a beta version of the store.
But now that the 7Digital store has opened fully to the US, you can find it by simply erasing "songbird" from the end of the URL (http://us.7digital.com). Songbird has not officially updated its native 7digital interface yet, which includes a recommendation engine based upon your library; but when songs are purchased through the store in the Songbird browser, they are still automatically queued, downloaded, and catalogued in the application.
Vendors need to start offering VBR (variable bit rate) mp3's. Lame Q4 or Q6 vbr will give you file sizes close to ~164-192kbps with a similiar quality to a 320kbps mp3. Also with the rate of storage technology the need to encode to mp3 (for space considerations) will soon be redundant: a flac or wavpack file is lossless and ~50% the size of the original pcm wav file.
I'll continue to buy second-hand CD's with the odd new CD, which lets me encode to the format of my choice with the ability to change that format if needed as technology changes.
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|Honestly a VBR MP3 with Q0 is still much better and really THE best option. Most buyers won't be able to distinguish it from a CD and is still smaller than a 256kbps MP3 that Amazon and 7Digital offer. FLAC is still considered too large for most consumers. Although I myself have archived my CD collection in FLAC i know many who could really care less about it due to it's lack of support in most music players
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|Sandisk supports FLAC and in this day of multi-TB drives, who cares about file size?
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|Wild guess: because most portable players don't have support for multi-terabyte storage? Do you actually know the cost of 1 TB on solid state?
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|...so you transcode them from FLAC to MP3 as you move the files to your PMP device.
Not really all that hard to do. :)
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|well yeah for people like us that are more technically inclined. But the average consumer still thinks ALL digital music files are MP3s.
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|Which is why it should be transparent to the user. The app itself should take care of the transcoding based on the device and the formats it supports.
Songbird, for example, should recognize a FLAC file being moved to a Sandisk MP3 player and automatically transcode it to MP3 when the user drags the file to the device.
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|Why hold up iTunes as some kind of standard? I have probably downloaded a total of 10 songs from iTunes in the past 5 years. And I suppose there are other people like me out there who don't speak up.
I don't like the proprietary format or having to strip out the DRM and information identifying me. And I really don't like having to pay their high prices when much cheaper and legal alternatives are available on the Internet. And I completely resent being subject to clandestine downloads of QuickTime and having my startup hijacked. (The same applies to Real Networks.) If Microsoft pulled this, people would be screaming.
But, I will say two things in iTunes favor. (1) If I can't find a song elsewhere, I can usually find it on iTunes, as long as its more or less mainstream. If I can't find a rare or imported song on the other sites, I doubt that it will turn up on iTunes. (2) While I may be forced to use their interface, I refuse to apply their updates. Fortunately the store still works without updating it.
I'm totally into computing on my terms and nobody else's. I buy things because they meet me needs and perform to my expectations. I don't buy anything because the crowd like it, or reviewers think it is the next big thing.
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|AAC/MP4 is hardly proprietary (not in the sense you seem to think it is), but yes, it has become synonymous with Apple for obvious reasons.
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|itunes on windows and itune on mac both seem to be the best imo. I use them both alot and the other wannabees do not sync photos and podcast as easy as itunes. I'm NOT a apple itunes fanboy, I just know what is practical.
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|Then you probably note that realistically itunes is complete bloat on Windows. Libraries over ~10000 songs dramatically reduces the responsiveness of the app.
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|yes, I def do prefer using my mac for my iphone/ipod purposes... actually, at this point I havent turned on my windows machine in 4 months lol
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|Tried it and it is no where near as nice as iTunes and lacks all the syncing features i get when i plug in my iPhone. iTunes is easily the best music organizer / storefront out there right now. Nothing comes close.
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|We'll see whether there is full support for players or not. It should be interesting to see if music player manufacturers support it fully.
The only complaint I've heard about Songbird is that it's as bulky as iTunes and the best thing is that it works on Linux/*BSD.
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|Still pretty buggy as well, from my understanding.
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|yeah if you like that kind of junk food :P
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|iTunes+ Quicktime (which is required) is a whopping 90MB download while Songbird is only 13.3MB download. So about the same size as Winamp but a far cry from iTunes. Even if you add a few addons it's still tinier than iTunes + Quicktimes
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|I like Songbird, it is definately a nice app. But i find the iPod support is just not as good as ml_ipod for winamp, plus i'm waiting for chiptune support and the CD ripping. Will take a look at 7Digital since so far i haven't found anything thats better than Amazon.com for MP3 downloads
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|I like ml_ipod for its simplicity and integration into my still-favorite media player, but I still prefer SharePod for transfers (2-way).
"plus i'm waiting for chiptune support"
That's one of the main reasons I use the Rockbox firmware on my iPod (MOD, NSF, SPC... and most importantly, SID files).
My Alpine in my truck doesn't recognize the device through the digital dock interface if I use anything but Apple's firmware, though. It's very frustrating.
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|I used Sharepod, up until i had enough hard drive space to store my library. Then i switched back to Winamp and got the ml_ipod plugin. I keep a copy of sharepod on my iPod since it's small and simple.
I use Rockbox as well. It supports chiptunes nicely but sadly not the PSF format, which Winamp itself at least does with the plugin,
I have the same issue in regards to car receivers, and many desk radios. They either support the iPod firmware or just treat the player as a mass storage drive. Remotes don't work when runnnig Rockbox either. 2 reasons i have not replaced the apple firmware.. yet.
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|I hear ya there. The addition of PSF, PSF2, and QSound support would be a dream come true. Possible issues with real-time decoding performance on the various players that Rockbox supports, though SID files are quite difficult to emulate "properly" as it is... so I'm not sure.
SID support with the High Voltage SID Collection makes me a happy camper though. =)
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|yeah i've heard flat out that most DAP hardware just can't handle decoding those formats. I'm sure it's only a matter of time, hopefully, that someone finds a way to optimize the code for Rockbox DAPs, without draining the battery too quickly.
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|No stupid I-Tunes? I would willingly PAY for that!
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|I've tried to like Songbird but it is just too buggy for Mac OS X. I'll continue buying my tracks from Amazon and loading them into iTunes :-)
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|Songbird is a terrific program anyway, this only makes it better. The next version will have CD ripping which is also a desirable addition.
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