Tomahawk: Next Generation Music Player?

This post is by Robbert van Ooijen; it originally appeared at Have You Heard It.

Last week a new music player got its first public release: the Tomahawk Player. In an era where music is often scattered across multiple computers and multiple platforms, the player aims to solve this problem by organizing all of your music in one desktop interface. It definitely sounds neat to have your music from SoundCloud, Ex.fm, Spotify and your MP3s all accessible on one location. Combined with the ability to directly import playlist from all over the web this could be the next generation music player.

On its website, the following is stated about the inducements to built the Tomahawk Player:

“Tomahawk was born out of frustration… frustration that the most widely used media players were designed to solve problems of a different era. No longer do we need desktop music players built 10 years ago that jam in CD ripping, label makers, device syncing, into a massive wad of code that takes minutes to even launch.”

Indeed, today’s most widely used desktop music players were built years ago. This made the guys behind Tomahawk think: “there has to be a better way”. They started to build their own player and last week it saw its first public 0.0.1 release. So, what does it do? Here are some of its features.

Play music coming from different sources.

The Tomahawk Player makes use of Playdar. This is a “music content resolver” that is aimed at solving one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now. Because the player uses this technology you can give it the metadata of a song you want to listen to (artist + title) and it will find a way to play it for you, whether the actual music file is located on your harddrive, on a remote machine, on the web or is available at your subscription service.

Import playlists from all over the web.

By using the XSPF playlist standard, the Tomahawk Player is able to import playlists metadata. This allows you to share and play playlists coming from friends or from somewhere on the web. After importing the playlist, the player will search for the matching music. Any content that you have available in Tomahawk will be used as the source for the song. If it doesn’t find the matching content it will skip the song. Of course, as you add more and more sources of music to the player, more music from these playlists can be played.

Create Custom Radio Stations.

The player makes use of music intelligence provided by The Echonest. This makes it possible for you to automatically create playlists that are based on several parameters. “You want an upbeat station that only plays obscure songs from artists similar to your favorites? Or, maybe you want the most popular songs that fit the description “moody”? Tomahawk has got the knobs and dials for it”.

These are just some of its promising features. Keeping in mind that the Tomahawk Player is an open-source project and this is only version 0.0.1, there’s a lot more to come. Tomahawk gives us a look into the future of music players, and this future looks bright!

Head over to http://gettomahawk.com to get Tomahawk for free.

The Tomahawk Player is a new open-source music player with great features. It is powered by technology from Playdar and The Echonest and looks very promising.