Yeah folks, we know it often feels like that there are too many music players available for Linux, but when they’re as innovative as Tomahawk we’re more than happy to take them for a spin…
Whilst we’ve written about this multi-source music player before chances are some of you will be new to it. So first up, a recap:
What is Tomahawk?
Tomahawk pitches itself as a music player that just works at just playing music, regardless of whether that music is on your hard drive or not. It achieves this by using small scripts called ‘resolvers’ that enable the search and playback of music content on services such as YouTube, Soundcloud, etc.
Tomahawk also allows you to sign in with a Jabber or Google Talk account so that you can play music from your friends libraries, the catch being that they need to be running Tomahawk.
Recent updates
Development on the Qt music player has (thankfully) picked up again of late, and the fruits of that attentive labour are showing:
There’s a revamped set of icons: –
A new ‘Dashboard’ appears on first launch which shows recent activity such as new playlists, newly imported albums, and recently played tracks: –
Clicking on an Artists’ name opens a ‘Artist’ pane with bio snippet, related artists, top tracks, as well as a list of all available tracks by that band in your Super Collection: –
You might also have noticed the ‘New Additions’ entry in the sidebar. This gives you quick access to the latest items added to your library, and for someone like me who is continually adding more and more music it saves on the need for “smart playlists” – or a good memory!
Other new features present in the latest releases include: –
- Ability to Love tracks
- Ability to create dynamic playlists of loved tracks
- Toma.hk hotlinks for sharing songs, stations and playlists (accessible via right-click)
- Ability to drag and drop Spotify and Rdio song links onto Tomahawk and have them automatically try to resolve and play
- Ability to drag and drop ‘Artists’ to create new playlists and stations
This is addition to all of the basic features you’d expect from a modern media player, such as Last.FM Scrobble support, playback options, playlists, etc.
Download
It looks good and you want to give a try, right? Ubuntu 11.04 users can add the official Tomahawk PPA for easy installation.
Add ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/tomahawk to your Software Sources, update, and then install Tomahawk through the Ubuntu Software Centre.
‘Resolvers’ – for additional source scouting – need to be downloaded and added manually. Information on this is available on the Tomahawk website.