Songbird is the open source equivalent to iTunes. It's built on top of Mozilla, giving it the same extendability as Firefox. However, OpenSolaris doesn't ship with an mp3 codec, so before you can enjoy your music with Songbird, you first need to solve the missing codec problem. In this blog entry I'll walk you through both steps.

Fluendo

The folks at Fluendo are one of the key contributors to the GStreamer open source multimedia framework. One of the products they "sell for free" is the Fluendo MP3 Decoder. I use the term "sell for free" because to get the decoder, you need to register with the Fluendo Web Shop, add the mp3 decoder to your cart and work through the checkout process.When you get to the Download page, click the mp3 icon in the center to download the codec:

When you make your way to the download page, get the package for Solaris i386 and save the decoder to your Desktop. The list isn't long, but in the screen capture below I've filtered it for i386 archictures:

Now open a terminal and unzip the archive:

bunzip2 Desktop/fluendo-mp3-4.solaris-intel.tar.bz2

Then extract the archive:

tar -xf Desktop/fluendo-mp3-4.solaris-intel.tar -C Desktop/ 

Copy the mp3 codec to the GStreamer plugins directory:

pfexec cp Desktop/codecs/libgstflump3dec.so /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ gst-inspect flump3dec
Factory Details:
  Long name:	Fluendo MP3 Decoder (C build)
  Class:	Codec/Decoder/Audio
  Description:	Decodes MPEG-1 Layer 1, 2 and 3 streams to raw audio frames
  Author(s):	Fluendo Support 
  Rank:		primary (256)

Plugin Details:
  Name:			flump3dec
  Description:		Fluendo MP3 decoder
  Filename:		/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstflump3dec.so
  Version:		0.10.8
  License:		unknown
  Source module:	gst-fluendo-mp3
  Binary package:	Fluendo MP3 Decoder
  Origin URL:		http://www.fluendo.com
  ...

Songbird

As of OpenSolaris 2008.11, Songbird is available in the IPS repository:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ pfexec pkg install SUNWsongbird
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                    1/1     504/504   21.55/21.55 

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                                601/601 
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Reading Existing Index                           9/9 
Indexing Packages                                1/1 

After the installation, you will now find Songbird under the Sound & Video Applications menu:

Start Songbird and enjoy.