With a plethora of options available for any taste, it’s a better time to be a digital music fan than ever before. iTunes Match. Spotify. Rdio. Soundcloud. Grooveshark. There’s a streaming music service for every taste, a place for every song in the cloud no matter how obscure.
With all of these competing services floating around, though, finding music in your library isn’t as easy as it once was, though… mostly because you probably don’t have a central music library. Some of your favorite albums are on iTunes, while others might only be available on Spotify, or knocking around as demos on Soundcloud.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iTunes-like media manager to consolidate all of your music? An app you could use to just find that song on all of your services, no matter where it’s stored: just type it in and hit play?
There is. It’s called Tomahawk. And it’s awesome.
Here’s how it works. Like iTunes, Tomahawk lets you play any music stored on your computer, and can also slurp in songs on your local network from playing remotely. Unlike iTunes, though, it scans your whole computer for MP3s automatically.
Where Tomahawk gets really cool, though, is that it can be extended to use a huge number of external music sources in addition to your local music. These are called resolvers, and there’s a number of them to choose from: Spotify, Grooveshark, YouTube, Dilandau, Soundcloud, 4Shared, Jamendo, Last.fm, Official.fm, Ampache / Owncloud and Ex.fm, for starters. And by choosing the Extended Network, you can access any friend’s library who is also using Tomahawk. You can even connect to friends using Twitter and Google.
It’s a really neat little bit of software, and the latest version 0.3.3 also gives you the ability to listen along in real-time with your friends’ music choices (sort of like DJing in Turntable.fm) or even make radio stations.
Tomahawk is for Mac and Windows only right now, and it can be downloaded here. I love it, but if only it had Rdio support!
[via Evolver.fm]
