“New”.  New is the key theme for everything we are introducing today.  New Tomahawk release, new logo, new look, new website, new features, new views, new ways to browse,  new ways to discover, new ways to play, new ways to sync, new sources of information, new ways to share, new localizations, new web-based experiences and new merchandise.  

Tomahawk 0.5

Let’s start with Tomahawk 0.5.  The most obvious things you will see are the new grid views/playback controls, redesigned artist pages and new track pages.  But, we also have new Preference and Plug-in Management settings that, among other things, now let you sync your Spotify playlists (bi-directionally) and Last.fm data.

We’ve also improved a bunch of the interface and user experience by adding forward/back navigation controls,  prioritizing resolution of any track you try to play (no more waiting for the all the tracks above it in a list to resolve before you can start listening), and adding keyboard media key controls for Windows & Linux in addition to the support for Mac we already had.  

A new New Releases feature is now available that lets you browse and play new releases by genre. This is a great companion to our existing Charts (including data from Hype Machine, We Are Hunted, Rdio, Spotify, iTunes, Billboard and more), and a yet another great way to discover music you may love.  You will also now find detailed track info pages (from any list by clicking the “i” icon or the song name in the Now Playing window). On that page you you can explore, play and queue related songs.  

There are also new controls.  In addition to easily being able to play artists and albums directly from the artwork grid views, we also now let you granularly control which of you gTalk, Jabber and Twitter connections can stream from you.  We’ve also heard the requests and added support for you to be able to tell Tomahawk to stop playing after a certain song in a list.

A new sharing widget (in the Now Playing window) now lets you easily post your currently playing song to your favorite social networks.  To better understand how the sharing works, keep reading below about all the new stuff on Toma.hk to see how sharing and playback of songs and playlists works for virtually any recipient… regardless of whether they use Tomahawk or not.

Last, but not least, Tomahawk has now been translated into more languages including Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Spanish (Castilian), Catalan, Russian, Polish and more. If your language is not completely translated or not yet supported, we would love your help in localizing.

Remember, Tomahawk is open-source and survives on the contributions of others… we can help support us via code, donations (via Flattr) and our/or by buying some or new Tomahawk merchandise.

If you want all the gory details on what’s in this release, you can view the complete changelog.

Toma.hk

One of the core values of Tomahawk is that is works as a universal translation layer across music services, repositories and geographic territories.  Also, across user interfaces… we realize that not everyone uses Tomahawk, or for that matter, doesn’t always want to use a desktop application as their music interface.  

So, we have completely revamped and built out the Toma.hk web experience to do that. When you share a link to a song on Toma.hk, anyone can easily listen to it directly in their browser.  We do that by supporting multiple services that are available all over the world, including: SoundCloud, YouTube, Official.fm, Deezer, Rdio, Last.fm, Ex.fm, Spotify and Jamendo. When you click play, it will playback directly in page using the best available source (with the exception of Spotify links which will open the Spotify application).  Finally, if you use Rdio and your friends use Spotify, you now have a way to share tastes without being tied to the same service provider. Oh, yeah… and it all works in modern mobile web browsers too.

If you have Tomahawk running, then not only can you easily add the song to your queue, you can also just as easily add it to a playlist or Love it.

But, there is more… every Song page has lists of related songs, all of which are also playable.  You can embed that song on any website or blog so that your visitors can listen with whatever service they prefer instead of you having to list multiple links.

But music is more than just about individual songs, and as such we have just added Artist pages and Album pages to Toma.hk… including discographies and related artists.  Playlists (now shareable directly from Tomahawk) are also available on Toma.hk.  They are multi-source and will find the best available for each track - and just like songs, and album - they are embeddable most anywhere.

Finally, we have added some Charts and New Releases  to go along with the multi-source Search that we’ve always had on Toma.hk.

Is your head spinning yet?  Because ours still are a little bit.  We are actually pretty sure that you will find new stuff even beyond all the things we’ve highlighted above, and we’re already working on a bunch more goodies for both Tomahawk and Toma.hk that that will follow soon.

As you can hopefully see, all that we do is to try and fulfill our goal of taking all the complexity out of music consumption, management and sharing.

Tomahawk, it just plays.