Don’t expect to see any new releases of Tomahawk player, a multi-service music app Windows, Mac and Linux.
A recent Github commit to the project code announces that the project “is essentially abandoned”.
“There is noone (sic) working on it. There isn’t much sense in adding any new issues in the issue tracker unless you want to fix them yourself,” the update adds.
Tomahawk is different to regular desktop music players like Rhythmbox because it takes a multi-source approach to compiling your music library.
You are able to search, browse and play local music files but also stream music from online services like Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Music, YouTube and others.
You simply search for a song and Tomahawk figures out the best place to play it from.
Another nifty feature let you connect to other Tomahawk users so that you can stream music from their catalog or listen along live to whatever they’re playing.
This intelligent, innovative approach to led to Wired calling it the ‘most important music app nobody’s talking about‘.
Open Source Software Never Truly Dies
While news of Tomahawk’s abandonment is disappointing to hear of it isn’t that much of a shock.
The Tomahawk Nightly PPA was last updated over a year ago, and the most recent stable build was in 2015.
The “good news” is that, should you have it installed, Tomahawk still works (at the time of writing) so don’t feel that you to apt purge it from your system. Just use it until you can’t.
But as this is open-source software development never really ends; anyone is free to step in, fork the code, and move the app forwards at any time.