Songbird is like an open source version of iTunes that handles just about everything that program does, while swapping out the iTunes store interface in favor of the world's music blogs.

With the open source music player Songbird finally making its v1.0 debut this past December after two years in development, the big question swirling around Songbird continues to be whether or not this Mozilla-based player will be able to give iTunes a run for its money.

Songbird turned 1.0 this week, and aims to do to iTunes what Firefox did to Internet Explorer. That is, it aims to take the basic design of something closed and proprietary, and turn it into something open and extensible and fun. Songbird aims to give the power back to the people.

"Eventually we think Songbird is going to be the coolest media player since sliced bread, but it sure is taking its time getting there. A new version of the open source, cross-platform jukebox software was released this week, but the latest Songbird is still stuck in the developer preview stage.

Songbird, which is a free, open source media player built on the same technologies underlying Firefox, is just about ready to take on iTunes.

This news, posted to the official SongBird blog last Friday, came as a shocking slap in the face to someone who only recently freed his music library from the clutches of iTunes. Songbird was the logical choice to prepare for my eventual immersion in Linux, and now Songbird’s future on that OS is no more.

Songbird is a free opensource customizable media player and web browse powered by Mozilla. Songbird runs on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. On the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Songbird utilizes the VideoLAN Client for media playback.

A year and a half ago, I was among those that celebrated the release of Songbird 1.0 -- a Mozilla based open source music challenger to iTunes.

"This guide shows how to install the Songbird media player (0.3 Developer Pre-Release) on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop. Songbird is a free software audio player with media database capabilities written using XUL and VLC, with an interface similar to Apple's iTunes. From the Songbird web site: "Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web.