The latest update to cross-platform media player ‘Tomahawk’ slipped out for Ubuntu without much in the way of fanfare.
But from the improvements and new features that came with it fanfare was wholly deserved…
What is Tomahawk?
Tomahawk pitches itself as a music player that just works at just playing music – regardless of whether it’s on your hard drive or not.
It achieves this latter effect through the use of of ‘resolvers’ – small add-in scripts that enable search and playback of content on YouTube, Soundcloud, etc.
It also has another insanely cool feature: by hooking up your Jabber or Google account you can play music from your friends libraries too – providing their running Tomahawk, naturally.
Extra ‘resolvers’ – i.e. sources – can be downloaded from the Tomahawk website and installed via the Settings dialog.
What’s new in this release?
Tomahawk 0.1 adds much-needed spit and polish to the interface.
‘Album view’ is finally implemented and looks great, making library browsing visually expedient.
Also improved is the ‘Settings’ dialog. Streamlined, tidied up and easier to use, it makes enabling Last.FM scrobbling or installing extra resolvers a cinch.
What else can it do
Tomahawk is also able to create so-called “genius” playlists thanks the The Echo Nest service.
Just type in an artist name, genre, adjective or more and the Echo Nest powered playlist will throw back playable results from your own music library as well as from online sources such as YouTube and SoundCloud (providing you have installed resolvers for these.)
Download
Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 users can install Tomahawk and related dependencies using the official Tomahawk PPA @ launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/tomahawk/+packages.