Here’s Tomahawk, a music player with a difference: it plays music from anywhere and almost everywhere. Not necessarily music from your collection, either.
When you first open it up, it does index your iTunes library, so all the songs from there are available to play (and put into playlists) inside Tomahawk.
But beyond your collection, Tomahawk uses plug-ins called “Resolvers” to let it access music from the net too. There’s a resolver for Spotify, but you need to be using a Spotify Premium account to make it work.
There are also resolvers for YouTube, last.fm, for Soundcloud, and for half a dozen other music services I’ve never even heard of.
Setting up the resolvers and getting them configured isn’t immediately obvious. You need to open the preferences, and click “Get more resolvers”. Once installed, some might need editing by clicking the wrench icon to the right of their name.
But the overall goal of Tomahawk is to make playing music easier than ever. You don’t need to know where the music files are, nor should you even care. All you want to do is listen to something – and Tomahawk will help you find it.
You’ll see in the screenshot above that I’d searched for some stuff by Peter Gabriel. Tomahawk found all the songs from a particular album, and sorted them in the correct order. But they came from several different sources. Tomahawk brought them all together for me. That’s a pretty powerful feature.
Tomahawk is still in early development (version 0.3.3 at the time of writing), but is being updated frequently. It’s free, open source, and cross-platform, and packed with features. I haven’t even mentioned all the social media stuff that’s packed in there too.
If you’re a keen music listener, I recommend you try it out.
[xrr rating=80%]
