QTrax Works from Songbird… No Wait, it is Songbird
Update: I posted a quick side by side comparison of Songbird and QTrax if you want to see some screenshots of “both” applications in action.
After playing with the anticipated QTrax beta, I have quickly discovered that QTrax.. is Songbird. Not just based on.. is.
This isn’t all that surprising since QTrax is supposedly based on the new media player, Songbird, but it turns out that the QTrax application they’ve been waiting to launch isn’t even required.
Songbird, to those who don’t know (and haven’t clicked the link yet), is a Mozilla (Firefox) based app-mashup of a web-browser (the Mozilla part) and a relatively well done iTunes clone.
Early reports suggested that QTrax was based on a development seed of Songbird, implying that they changed some functionality to make the two applications incompatible with each other. This was a fair assumption, given the other reports that the application would force users to watch the ads that made the service free. But with an open source client, it would be pretty hard to force anyone to do anything. It turns out that all QTrax has done was write a few extensions to change up the UI and bundled the WMA and QuickTime extensions with the download. I guess they’re trying to trick people into thinking "QTrax", not "Songbird".
So if you want to play around with QTrax and can’t find the download link on the site, just grab Songbird and load up or bookmark http://music.qtrax.com.
I’m still trying to find out how to pull the "QTrax search engine" widget (for the search bar) out of the app, but I’ll post it once I figure it out.. Update @ 8pm: So I build a quick search engine using the form from the Mycroft project. You can grab the engine from here, just make sure you install it from Songbird.
