Nightingale is a discontinued free, open source audio player based on the Songbird media player source code. As such, Nightingale's engine is based on the Mozilla

XULRunner XULRunner is a discontinued, packaged version of the Mozilla platform to enable standalone desktop application development using XUL, developed by Mozilla. It replaced the ''Gecko Runtime Environment'', a stalled project with a similar purpose. ...

with libraries such as the GStreamer media framework and libtag providing media tagging and playback support, amongst others. Since official support for Linux was dropped by Songbird in April 2010, Linux-using members of the Songbird community diverged and created the project. By contrast to Songbird, which is primarily licensed under the

GPLv2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

but includes artwork that is not freely distributable, Nightingale is free software, licensed under the

, with portions under the MPL and

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

licenses. Nightingale has not seen a new release since 2014 and most, if not all, Nightingale developers are no longer actively contributing to its development.

Notable features

* Plugins compatible with

Songbird A songbird is a bird belonging to the suborder Passeri of the perching birds ( Passeriformes). Another name that is sometimes seen as the scientific or vernacular name is Oscines, from Latin ''oscen'', "songbird". The Passeriformes contains 50 ...

(with one modification to the addon) * Multi-platform compatibility with

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

, Vista, 7, 10,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and Mac OS X v10.5 (x86, x86-64). * Ability to play multiple audio formats, such as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Orig ...

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

Apple Lossless The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music ...

and WMA * Ability to play Apple

FairPlay FairPlay is a digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Apple Inc. It is built into the MP4 multimedia file format as an encrypted AAC audio layer, and was used until April 2009 by the company to protect copyrighted works sold thr ...

-encoded audio on Windows and Mac platforms via hooks into

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

(authorization takes place in iTunes) * Ability to play

Windows Media DRM Windows Media DRM or WMDRM, is a Digital Rights Management service for the Windows Media platform. It is designed to provide delivery of audio or video content over an IP network to a PC or other playback device in such a way that the distributor c ...

audio on Windows platforms *A skinnable interface, with skins called "feathers" * Media files stored on pages viewed in the browser show up as playable files in Nightingale * MP3 file download * Ability to subscribe to MP3 blogs as

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs, but sometimes a loop. The term has sev ...

s * Ability to build custom mixes * Ability to scan the user's computer for all audio files and add them to a local library * A configurable and collapsible

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

similar to iTunes, and mini-player mode * Keyboard shortcuts and media keyboard support * Last.fm integration via a plugin, complete with love/hate buttons * Microsoft MTP compatible device support * Ability to edit and save metadata tags * Gapless playback and

ReplayGain ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for ind ...

* Watch folders * Media import and export (from and to iTunes) *Automatic Library Files Organization

Add-ons

Extensions

Users can add features and change functionality in Nightingale by installing extensions. Extensions are similar to the

Extensions Extension, extend or extended may refer to: Mathematics Logic or set theory * Axiom of extensionality * Extensible cardinal * Extension (model theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values that satisfy the predicate * Ext ...

for the Firefox browser and can be easily

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a Computing platform, computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) ...

. Community coded extensions are available o
The Nightingale Addons Page

Skins

Skin Skin is the layer of usually soft, flexible outer tissue covering the body of a vertebrate animal, with three main functions: protection, regulation, and sensation. Other cuticle, animal coverings, such as the arthropod exoskeleton, have diffe ...

s are referred to as "feathers" in Nightingale, and give users and artists the ability to change the look of Nightingale via an extension which generates a default skin. Using

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone t ...

(and optionally

XUL XUL ( ), which stands for XML User Interface Language, is a user interface markup language developed by Mozilla. XUL is an XML dialect for writing graphical user interfaces, enabling developers to write user interface elements in a manner simil ...

), and an image manipulation program such as

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in ras ...

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...

, users are then able to make Nightingale look however they want.

References

External links

* *
Frenchbirds, a French Nightingale community
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nightingale(Software) 2006 software Free software projects Free software programmed in C++ Free media players Free web browsers Gecko-based software Gopher clients IPod software Jukebox-style media players macOS media players Solaris media players Tag editors Windows media players Windows web browsers Portable software Linux media players Software that uses GStreamer Software that uses XUL Discontinued web browsers