It just plays (and sometimes blogs)
There are few things we enjoy more than seeing seeing all of the cool stuff that people are building in, and around, Tomahawk. Our developer community is nothing short of amazing - according to the open-source project tracking site, Ohloh, we have had over 74 contributors (and growing) to the core codebase that represents an estimated 59 person-years worth of effort.
Also, it is great seeing others leveraging the Tomahawk APIs to create a growing ecosystem of cool experiences and tools. We’ve just updated our site with a bunch more of these (if you know of more, let us know and we’ll add them!).
Some of the newest include:
Tomahawk has been an open-source labor of love for us for the last 2.5+ years, and it’s amazing to see that others share our passion making music easier to manage, play and share. We thank you all.
<something>.axe). To learn more, you can read the packaging specification.
As you may have noticed, we have removed the ability to connect to friends directly via Twitter in this release. While the feature was pretty clever (if we do say so ourselves), it never quite worked as well as we wanted it to. It was unreliable, slow, and not very user friendly. So we are going back to the drawing board on that and will be introducing new ways to connect to your other networks in future releases.
We hope you all enjoy this release. As always - and thanks to our growing open-source contributor community - there is much more to come.
We’ve just about finished our next release, but before we push 0.7 to all of you we’d love some help testing it out.
Interested? It’s easy, just download our latest Release Candidate and use it as normal. Notice anything wonky about it, just let us know!
The rest of you just hold tight… we expect to be pushing the final 0.7 version to you soon.
Not a lot to say about this little update other than we improved stability, improved networking and cleaned up some of the design elements a little bit.
Also, we tracked down and squashed a bug with the Spotify resolver that was affecting some Windows users. We pushed that out to everyone (across all versions/OSes), and to get it all you need to do is restart Tomahawk.
For those that already have Tomahawk, we’ve pushed the updates already. For those that don’t:
As a bit of a tease, we are working extremely hard on some very big, new, exciting things. Watch this space.
About a year ago we posted a tip for you Mac users about a handy global search shortcut for the awesome Alfred app. It seems since that time there has been a big upgrade for Alfred that supports full custom workflows (in the Powerpack upgrade, ~ $20).
Given that knowledge, and a few minutes playing with it, we now have the ability to not only search from Alfred, but also return results, play, previous, next and pause directly from the Alfred interface.
It’s great, and well worth the the $20 to support the team doing amazing work on Alfred. For those that just want the basic search as shown in the first post, that works with the free version of Alfred too.
Check them out:
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There is more to come with this (and will post an update soon), but it’s already really fun/useful to play around with.
Updated: There was a mistake in the call to initiate a new track. It has been corrected below.
So, you want to build a cool music hack, site or app and the idea of having to interface with a bunch of different music sources keeps you awake at night? Well, we now have you covered with a really simple multi-source music API that rids you of all the music fulfillment headaches and lets you focus on building your awesome app “that just plays” for virtually all of your users regardless of who their preferred provider is.
Simply paste in a link to our js file, then you are ready to go.
To initiate a new track:
var track = window.tomahkAPI.Track(TRACK_TITLE, ARTIST_TITLE, options)Where your options are:
And finally, you need to render the track onto the page.
document.getElementById("parent_container”).appendChild(track.render())Sources currently leveraged include SoundCloud, Official.fm, Last.fm, Deezer, Jamendo, YouTube, Rdio and Spotify - with more on the way. If you users have already set their source preferences and priorities on Toma.hk then those will travel with them to your apps.
Thanks to everyone that helped test the Tomahawk 0.6 beta last week. We’ve squashed some nasty bugs - both in the app and the Spotify resolver - since then and are now pushing version 0.6 (read/see all about what’s new) to all our Windows and Mac users.
As always, the latest builds are available on our website. We will tweet (follow @tomahawk) when there are new Linux packages available, as our packagers finish them.
Enjoy!
Uncovery is a little hack that creates and tweets Toma.hk links to critically acclaimed albums. It is about 6 months old, but has proven to be a consistently solid resource for discovery-via-curation.
The Odds by The Evens [Metascore: 83] bit.ly/QsS6hh
— Uncovery (@uncovery) November 20, 2012
If you want a little more context, there is a snippet of the review itself posted on Uncovery’s tumblr. You can also read more about it from Evolver.fm’s coverage of it from the summer.
Reading this post on a brand new computer, or maybe with a shiny new gift subscription to a music service you received over the holidays? Even if you’re not, you are all in luck as we are excited to bring the beta of Tomahawk 0.6 into this world!
As you can hopefully notice, we continue to clean up and improve performance and stability under the hood as well as the user experience. We are also already working on some major additions for the desktop release after this one, bringing improvements and capability to Toma.hk on the web, and work is progressing very nicely on an Android app (also open-source). In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this release as much as we are.
Changelog
As for this beta, we’d really appreciate bug reports… particularly from Windows users. Also, thanks to our community we now have at least partial translations in 17 different languages. If one of languages isn’t (fully) supported you can easily contribute just by translating text strings online.
We realize that this release timing continues our tradition of launching releases at the worst possible times from a PR perspective - Consumer Electronics Show, late Friday afternoons, the day of Apple’s WWDC, Christmas break - but we were excited to get this into everyone’s hands as soon as we felt it was ready. Like it? Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your friends’ families! Don’t like it? Tell us!
If you are on an older version of Tomahawk you can update to this beta by manually downloading/installing (don’t worry, all of your playlists and data stay intact).
To celebrate Last.fm’s 10 years of scrobbling - and the fact that Twitter is starting to roll out the ability to download the complete history of your tweets - we wanted to highlight a little known feature of Tomahawk… the ability to import your complete scrobble history (and your loved tracks) from Last.fm.
It’s simple to do, just got to Tomahawk’s preferences, and on the Services tab just click the configure button (wrench) on the Last.fm plug-in.
While you won’t necessarily immediately notice the impact of importing your listening history (although you will see your Loved Tracks get added to that playlist), you can rest assured that we will be offering some cool new features based on that data soon.
Speaking of soon… we are just wrapping up a 0.6 release (a sneak peek in the screenshot above) which we will have to you in the coming weeks. Happy holidays!
