# Songbird port?



## LeFroid (Feb 20, 2010)

Hey guys, I've been running Songbird as my music player of choice for a long time on my linux install.

I did some googling about this for freebsd and found out that someone ported an old version of this a while ago. Does anyone know if there's an available port around or can someone explain how to port this to bsd?


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## SirDice (Feb 22, 2010)

Looks like a closed source application. So there won't be anything to 'port'. That said, you may be able to get it working using the linux ABI layer.


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## thuglife (Feb 22, 2010)

Songbird is opensource actually and there is this page on the wiki.

I want to start contributing to FreeBSD so i will have a look, maybe this is a good start.


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## ikbendeman (Feb 23, 2010)

I tried to get it running under linux compatibility but I can't seem to get it to play media, though everything else works great. Any suggestions on how to do this? I just tried extracting the tar.gz to ~/songbird and running ~/songbird/songbird. And its GPL'd. It's just authored by a company.


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## SirDice (Feb 23, 2010)

Ah.. I couldn't find any reference to source code on the mainpage. This lead me to believe it was closed source. If you want to try to port it this is a good place to start:

Porter's handbook (yes, we even have a handbook for that  )


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Feb 23, 2010)

I have Songbird 1.4.3 running in OpenSolaris (b133). In fact it's part of the OS. This implies that the code somehow should be available.


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## SirDice (Feb 23, 2010)

Graaf_van_Vlaanderen said:
			
		

> I have Songbird 1.4.3 running in OpenSolaris (b133). In fact it's part of the OS. This implies that the code somehow should be available.



Not really. OpenSolaris also contains Flash/Macromedia. And you certainly don't have access to that source code.


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Feb 23, 2010)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Not really. OpenSolaris also contains Flash/Macromedia. And you certainly don't have access to that source code.



I wouldn't call this a fair comparison since Songbird is supposed to be open source and the latter is definitely proprietary. 
Or is there anything I am missing here?


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## thuglife (Feb 23, 2010)

Yeap , i took a look at the source code yesterday and the configure template is win, macos, linux and solaris aware.

They have some precompiled dependencies for each platform on the source control,
took care of that but it requires a custom xulrunner build too and this is where i am stuck right now.


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## DutchDaemon (Feb 23, 2010)

Graaf_van_Vlaanderen said:
			
		

> I wouldn't call this a fair comparison since Songbird is supposed to be open source and the latter is definitely proprietary.
> Or is there anything I am missing here?



SirDice's response was logical if he read (as I did initially), 'It's part of OpenSolaris, so the source code should be available'. It's not logical if you actually meant 'It's part of the operating system (the base system in FreeBSD terms), so the source code should be available', which is what I assume you were getting at. Flash is, of course, not part of the operating system itself, but of the OpenSolaris installation/distribution.


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## SirDice (Feb 23, 2010)

DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> SirDice's response was logical if he read (as I did initially), 'It's part of OpenSolaris, so the source code should be available'. It's not logical if you actually meant 'It's part of the operating system (the base system in FreeBSD terms), so the source code should be available', which is what I assume you were getting at. Flash is, of course, not part of the operating system itself, but of the OpenSolaris installation/distribution.



Yep, that's exactly what I meant. I can't really consider songbird part of the OS either. The fact that it's supplied (and installed) with OpenSolaris is no guarantee it's open source.


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## ckester (Feb 23, 2010)

thuglife said:
			
		

> Yeap , i took a look at the source code yesterday and the configure template is win, macos, linux and solaris aware.
> 
> They have some precompiled dependencies for each platform on the source control,
> took care of that but it requires a custom xulrunner build too and this is where i am stuck right now.



I think you're discovering why there hasn't been a songbird port yet.  It's a complicated piece of software.

That said, I'm glad to hear that someone's taking a swing at it.


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## ikbendeman (Feb 24, 2010)

That said, we don't necessarily need a port, why can't we just have a linux-songbird port?


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## Graaf_van_Vlaanderen (Feb 25, 2010)

ckester said:
			
		

> I think you're discovering why there hasn't been a songbird port yet.  It's a complicated piece of software.
> 
> That said, I'm glad to hear that someone's taking a swing at it.



Exactly. I remember OpenSolaris integrating Songbird for over a year now. But it's only since (a week ago) built 133 (Songbird 1.4.3), that's been working fine. I have been using Songbird on OpenSolaris for a week now and haven't come across any issues. I just needed to add a free 'fluendo' plugin to be able to play mp3.


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