Project Ideas

This page contains ideas for projects that would help Songbird but which currently fall outside of our Roadmap.

Project: Share playlists on Imeem / Muxtape

Description: Users should be able to share their playlists by right-clicking on them service pane and selecting "Share on Imeem" or "Share on Muxtape" and having them uploaded to the playlist sharing site.

Interested Developers: Ian

Consumer Benefits: Uploading to playlist sharing services is currently painful. We can make that easier.

Developer Benefits: This will test our playlist commands APIs. This might make a good example extension for external developers wanting to integrate with social media services.

Company Benefits: Attract users of social media services. Validate our APIs.

Project: Pownce support

Description: Some groups are sharing favorite songs through Pownce's file sharing. Songbird could consume audio files shared with the user and allow the user to share individual audio files with their friends.

Interested Developers: Ian, Jon Crosby, Stevo

Consumer Benefits: Users can share music with their friends

Developer Benefits: Test our playlist commands APIs.

Company Benefits: Demonstrate integration with a third-party media web service.

Project: birdscripts

Description: Combine the ideas of Greasemonkey Userscripts.org and Doug's Applescripts for iTunes - have a repository of js scripts that use the Web Page API to carry out specific tasks. Let users edit the scripts live on a site, rate them, run them, bookmark them, etc.

Interested Developers: Ian, Ryan Tomayko

Consumer Benefits: A central repository of simple scripts for users to use and edit.

Developer Benefits: Test the Web Page API. Provide a place to share simple scripts. Provide a testbed for script development.

Company Benefits: Build a community of beginner developers, promote the Web Page API.

Project: USB Mass Storage (Linux + Mac)

Description: The current USB mass storage device support is on the old device API and is Windows specific. It shouldn't be too hard to build new USB mass storage support that's cross-platform using our new device API

Interested Developers: Ian, Aus

Consumer Benefits: Use devices on Linux and Mac

Developer Benefits: Prove the device API

Company Benefits: Makes Songbird useful to more users, proves the device API, enhances the cross-platform story.

Project: Bluetooth Sync

Description: Many media players - especially phones support bluetooth OBEX (file transfer). It would be neat to add OBEX device support so that phones would show up in the service pane as soon as they're in range and automatically sync. Wires are so lame.

Interested Developers: Ian (Linux-specific support)

Consumer Benefits: Wireless sync with their devices

Developer Benefits: More use of the Device API

Company Benefits: Cool features, potential partnerships with handset manufacturers

Project: Integrate userscripts and scraping

Description: Right now our web page scraping is hard-coded. It would be great to allow developers to extend scraping to support new formats/patterns (eg: hAudio microformat / RDFa) and specific sites (eg: muxtape). We could allow developers and advanced users to express these rules as greasemonkey userscripts.

Interested Developers: Ian, Jon Crosby

Consumer Benefits: Better integration with more sites

Developer Benefits: A new, simple, familiar way to extend the platform

Company Benefits: Boot-strap the mediaweb with site-specific scripts!

Project: libtorrent (rtorrent) based bittorrent client

Description: Allow download from and seeding to bittorrent trackers

Interested Developers: Ian

Consumer Benefits: bittorrent!

Developer Benefits:

Company Benefits:

Project: Twitter Integration aka SongTweet

Description: Songbird autotweets "@plays $current_song". I've conveniently registered the twitter name "plays". The nest side collects all the tweets and republishes them into ones' followers' Songbirds.

Interested Developers: Rob, Jon Crosby, Stevo, GeekShadow

Consumer Benefits: Twitter integration in a clever way. See foodfeed.us for parallel.

Developer Benefits: Presumably other twitter integrations could leverage this code.

Company Benefits: Tap into a large, existing early adopter social network.

LiveTweeter add-on almost do the job : http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1204

Project: Songbird-specific Chatzilla/IRC enhancements

Description: Playing status update. DCC send from library/playlist/currently playing. Many more.

Interested Developers: Rob, Mitch

Consumer Benefits: IRC is teh fun!

Developer Benefits: IRC is where developers lurk.

Company Benefits: IRC is where early adopters lurk.

Project: Coverflow++

Description: Media view similar to cover flow. Here's a Flash component that makes doing so straightforward:http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/3dwall/

Interested Developers: Rob

Consumer Benefits: iTunes parity

Developer Benefits: Resuable flash component for Coverflow-like presentation

Company Benefits:iTunes parity

Project: Open Web Music (un)Locker

Description: A combination of add-on and OpenID/OAuth-enabled web service, possibly with an S3 backend. Create a resizable cache on any Songbird-graced machine and connect it to your account on the web service. Any track from the music locker can be streamed immediately, but frequently played tracks are cached locally at full quality for each Songbird client that a user installs on any machine or device. As listening habits change, less frequently played tracks fall out of the cache (once full) and newer popular tracks take their place. (Per Koshi, streaming friends' lists would also be a plus. Granting access to OpenIDs on top of the OAuth model would be a snap.)

Interested Developers: Jon Crosby, Stevo, Ryan Tomayko

Consumer Benefits: A music library that transcends location, player, and device

Developer Benefits: Tests playlist command APIs. If the web service were also released as open source, anyone could host their own version of it given the open standards supporting authentication and authorization -- no centralized service required.

Company Benefits: Demonstrates benefits of Songbird's open model.

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