TOMAHAWK | blog

More Goodies - Thanks to You All!

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:44:09 -0400

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:

Tomawall - Extract the recently posted tracks from your timeline into a playlist that “just plays” even if you are not a Spotify or Rdio subscriber.
XSPF Playlist Generator (Wordpress plugin)- Create custom playlist parsers for your favorite site and automatically import and create playable Tomahawk embedded players of those playlists on your Wordpress site
Toma.hk Shortcodes (Wordpress plugin)- Toma.hk Shortcodes allows you to easily embed playlists, albums and single tracks from Toma.hk directly into your Wordpress site.

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.

Tomahawk 0.7 is Here

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:51:00 -0400

With the last release we teased you with the pending arrival of some big new things. The good news is, we’ve made huge progress on those things. The bad news is… this release is not that. Don’t get us wrong, we love 0.7 - it’s our best release yet and we think you’ll love it too.

We’ve made some substantial improvements to the way content resolvers are packaged and installed . If you are only using the resolvers included with Tomahawk then you will likely not notice any difference, but if you are writing or installing resolvers from elsewhere (e.g. this repository) this will make your life much easier. Over the next couple of days we will bundle up all of those resolvers and make them available that way too.

A packaged resolver bundle is a file with file extension .axe. It is a compressed archive with all the contents of a resolver directory. To install such a bundle (the preferred way for end users who wish to install a resolver manually), in Tomahawk’s Settings dialog click on “Install from file” and select the package file (<something>.axe). To learn more, you can read the packaging specification.

Tomahawk 0.7.0 Changelog:

JavaScript Resolvers can now expose collections.
Introduced bundle system for JavaScript Resolvers, called “axes”.
Fixed playback-loop caused by duplicate tracks in a playlist.
Improved peer handling and removed connection support through Twitter.
Taking an account offline now also disconnects associated peers.
Improved Spotify protocol handling.
Added “Append to Playlist” context menu item.
User-friendlier collection handling: added info-buttons for artists and albums. Double-clicking an item expands it now.
Charts only load on-demand now.
Fixed Diagnostics information not correctly updating.
Fixed issue with hidden sidebar and panels.
Fixed issues with some color schemes.
Fixed playing files with special characters in the filename.
Improved stability.
Added translations for Catalan, Czech, Galician, Greek, Italian and Chinese.
(Windows) Smoother and more responsive audio playback.
(Linux) Fixed grid issues with GTK-styles.

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.

Download Tomahawk

Testing, Testing, 1.... 2.... 0.7

Wed, 01 May 2013 07:08:40 -0400

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.

Tomahawk 0.6.1

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:08:00 -0400

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:

DOWNLOAD TOMAHAWK

As a bit of a tease, we are working extremely hard on some very big, new, exciting things. Watch this space.

Feature'd Hack: Alfred 2 Tomahawk Workflow

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:44:00 -0400

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:

Download/install Workflow (or view source code) - requires Alfred Powerpack

Install Basic Search Shortcut

There is more to come with this (and will post an update soon), but it’s already really fun/useful to play around with.

Toma.hk API: Making Music Hacks Easier Since 2013

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 08:40:00 -0500

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.

http://toma.hk/api.html

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:

width = width of the player (in pixels)
height = height of player (in pixels)
handlers = the event handlers for you to decide what to do and when

Note: you could just hide the Toma.hk embedded player in a <div> if you didn’t want it visible - although you should disable YouTube if you do so.

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.

Tomahawk 0.6: From Beta to Gold

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:58:47 -0500

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!

Feature'd Hack: Uncovery

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 10:08:00 -0500

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.

Beta: Tomahawk 0.6

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 08:54:00 -0500

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!

Download: Windows
Download: OS X

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

Improved icon theme with vector graphics.
Higher resolution artist and album images.
You can now click artists, albums and tracks mentioned in artists’ biographies.
New AudioControl logic - only enable Prev/Skip buttons if available.
Added more options to right-click/context menus.
Make friends’ currently playing song (in sidebar) clickable.
Improve MusicBrainz plugin to use normalized artist names and avoid duplicate tracks.
Access Control queries now stay on the bottom of the job view, removing the tendency to jump away from the mouse.
Improved random mode, preventing songs from being played in too rapid succession.
You can now choose between various view modes for your playlists.
Support for high-resolution displays (e.g. Retina)
Nicer layout for the Artist, Album & Track pages.
Follow HTTP redirects when fetching Playlists.
Main menu can now be hidden and instead be shown as a toolbar button.
Connectivity controls in the toolbar.
Cleaned up settings dialog.
Ability to sync Spotify Starred Tracks with Tomahawk’s Loved Tracks.
Fixed iTunes m3u playlist support (export from iTunes, import into Tomahawk).
Support dropping of new Soundcloud user, track, set & likes URLs.
Added HotNewHipHop as available chart.
Add iTunes as available source for New Releases.
Updates and additions to translations including: Japanese, Bulgarian, Finish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Swedish and more.
(Linux) Allow disabling of playback notifications.

We also continue to improve and add more music sources (aka “content resolvers”). For example, the latest Spotify resolver not only lets you sync playlists bi-directionally, but will also let you sync your Starred Tracks in Spotify and your Loved Tracks in Tomahawk (as well as optionally publish those to your Last.fm Loved Tracks). Work is progressing on a numer of new sources/services as well - domestic and international subscription services, music lockers, public domain repositories and more (e.g. Rdio, Google Music, Qobuz, Beets, jazz-on-line). Want to write a content resolver yourself? It’s not that hard, learn how! Tomahawk resolvers run locally on your computer, so you can write and run them just for yourself, add them to our gallery so others can install and use them, or even get them added to the list of server-side resolvers we use on Toma.hk.

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).

Download: Windows
Download: OS X

After a short beta period that also gives our Linux packagers time to update (here’s the tarball), we will then automatically push this update to the rest of our existing users.

Happy new year! We think you will like what we have in store for Tomahawk this year.

Import Your Last.fm Listening History

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:44:00 -0500

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!

Content Resolution in a (Short) URL

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:56:00 -0400

Want to systematically share playable Spotify, Rdio or Deezer content easily with people that don’t use Spotify, Rdio or Deezer? It’s as easy to do as inserting http://toma.hk/search.php?q= in front of the link you are sharing from those services:

http://toma.hk/search.php?q=http://www.rdio.com/artist/Various_Artists/album/Project_Bicycle/

With the new preferences on Toma.hk that let users set their music source preferences, you now basically have content resolution wrapped up in a single URL.

Toma.hk: Now with More 'Hawkiness

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:03:24 -0400

While we continue to be hard at work down on the ground, we thought we’d float up a weather balloon with a new and improved Toma.hk release for your enjoyment. We’re not sure if it’s supersonic… but we think it is at least prettydamncoolsonic.

So, right to jump:

Search

We’ve added proper search to Toma.hk… just type in a some keywords and get back matching list of artists, albums and tracks.

Link Resolution

In our new-fangled search box, you can also paste any Spotify, Rdio or Deezer link to jump directly to the corresponding Toma.hk page for that track, playlist or artist. For there you can then listen to it from the service of your choice. So, easily turn those Spotify links to Rdio, Rdio to Deezer, Deezer to YouTube… you name it.

Resolver Preferences

You may have noticed a new Settings icon reveal itself from the top of the page. From our new setting page you can disable any content sources that you don’t want to appear, and drag and drop to reorder the priority order in which they are presented. In addition, if you are using the Tomahawk desktop app, you can decide whether you want the the Play button to either play the track immediately or just insert it into your Queue so as to not interrupt your flow.

Those preferences will travel with you for all Toma.hk content… included embedded players across the web and our “Play Now” bookmarklet (aka Tomahklet).

Bookmarklet

Speaking of our somewhat awkwardly named Tomahklet bookmarklet, that got a nice boost too - as it now supports continuous play. It will now automatically progress to the next track directly in the page you used it on. As always, you can click the playlist icon at the top of the sidebar it creates to be taked to a proper Toma.hk page for the playlist.

Embedded Player Wizard

While you can continue to grab embedded players for any track, album or playlist directly from its Toma.hk page, we now have a new tool to make creating embedded players faster, simpler and more customizable. As the person doing the embedding, you can decide to disable one or more sources for your embedded player. For example, if you notice it is resolving to the wrong song or a cover version (e.g. on YouTube) you can disable it.

We hope you enjoy. We’ve got a bunch more big stuff in the works, and we can’t wait to show it to you all.

Have a .xspf Playlist? Make it Sing.

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:55:00 -0400

While we are finishing up our proper Web API, we wanted to share a sneak peek at a simple way to systematically create a Toma.hk playlist out of any standard hosted .xspf playlist.

http://toma.hk/import/playlist?xspf=http://tunes.io/xspf

It will import that playlist, generate a toma.hk page for it and then (of course) resolve each track against multiple services so that it listenable by virtually anyone.

Just put your own .xspf URL in place of the http://tunes.io/xspf one and watch the magic happen. On a related note, that Tunes.io playlist is great… if you add it to Tomahawk it will update everyday with new great tracks (read all about it here: http://tunes.io/about/).

New Official.fm Resolver

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:34:59 -0400

Last week Official.fm publicly launched their new API. So in the spirit of this past weekend’s Music Hackday in Edinburgh, we just updated the Official.fm resolver to take advantage of the content on their new platform (including some great new and live content from artists and labels such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Cloud Nothings, As I Lay Dying, Bob Mould and more).

If you already have the Official.fm resolver enabled, it will automatically update when you relaunch Tomahawk. If you don’t, just open your Preferences and click the box.

Have a music service or source that you’d like to see supported by Tomahawk? Just let them know… if they have a public API then writing a resolver is easy.

Rock is Dead... and non-portability of music data killed it

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:47:00 -0400

Our not-so-humble goal with Tomahawk is to fundamentally change the way music is consumed and shared. Instead of sharing links to specific and unique instances of a particular copy of a song, Tomahawk abstracts away all that complexity so the info about songs is shared. By using the metadata only, Tomahawk will then find the best source to play the song based on the listener’s available music sources, not the sharers.

This approach creates a universal translation layer… across music service providers, music repositories and geographic territories.

So, give it a try, lend a hand and spread the word. Let’s break down the walls and get the music flowing again.

Help Us Help You (Part 1): What's Your Favorite Tomahawk Feature?

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:44:00 -0400

One of the challenges we face as we build out - and try to educate people about - Tomahawk is that the product(s) already do a lot, and we have plans for a lot more. One thing we’d love to have your help on is just what it is about Tomahawk that you find most compelling.

This will not only help us prioritize future development, but will also help us hone our messaging so that we know what exactly it is that resonates with most users - and potential users.

So, our ask is simple… can your read the list people and make the one choice that best represents you answer?

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We thank you all so much for using/trying/talking about Tomahawk. We will be returning the favor soon with even more goodness.

Toma.hk Bookmarklet

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 07:55:00 -0400

Last week we told you a bit about our vision behind Toma.hk and how content creators, curators and fans could all benefit from it. Today we are happy to introduce the next piece of that vision and the evolution of Tomahawklet.

It’s (now) called Tomahklet (I pronounce it “tahm-ah-klet” but we won’t blame you if you just want to call it the “Play Now” button). As always, a video is worth a million words…

Currently there about about 45 different sites/pages that are supported with more being added all the time. If you have an idea for something you’d like support for, you can easily write a scraper yourself, or just tweet at us and we will see what we can do.

Give it a spin

Happy listening!

What's the Big Idea: The Promise of Toma.hk

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 08:36:21 -0400

I thought I’d take a quick minute to talk about the promise, as we see it, in Toma.hk for the music ecosystem as a whole.

For Fans:

A single, universally playable, URL for a song - Spotify subscribers, Rdio subscribers, iTunes buyers, YouTube hunters, music blog scourers … all able to share with each other. No more spammy (and generally ignored) links that require me to use the same service (if it’s even available in my territory) to listen to the song you are sharing. It takes us back to the way we always shared music in the past… a conversation about a song by an artist, not a link to a particular reproduction of that song from a specific provider. If you like it, you can easily use the Tomahawk desktop app to “collect” everything you like… sort of like Instapaper… for music.

For Curators:

If you are a blogger, music reviewer, editor or publication you are forced to search and embed content from multiple services (e.g. a SoundCloud embed for one song, a YouTube embed for another) or exclusively use embeds or links from one of the subscription providers. Or worse yet… do all of the above. With Toma.hk embeds all you have to do is give it the name of a the song and artist, and we handle all the complexity of finding that track across multiple providers. No matter what source or service your readers prefer, we’ve provided them actionable content that they can engage with directly on your site. More time on your site + less work to publish = a pretty good recipe (at least in our minds).

For Artists and Labels:

When you are promoting a song, you are currently forced into a similar situation as the curators. You can either have your track available to stream for free, or you can do your promos using a subscription service embed or link. Free generally works everywhere (with notable exceptions such as YouTube not having music videos available in Germany), but you forsake any opportunity for streaming revenue. Exclusively servicing promos using a subscription service means you are inherently limiting the userbase that can hear your promotion. Remember this: there is no subscription service that is available in every territory… and even in those territories they are available, only a small fraction of users are using them. With Toma.hk, if a listener already has a relationship with a subscription service, you get paid for them listening from that source (they are already paying for). If they don’t have a relationship with a paid streaming service, they can still hear your music by rolling back to your music promotion platform of choice (e.g. Official.fm). This hybrid approach automatically grows the monetization of your promos as the user bases of the subscription services grow.

For Music App Creators:

Why are you paying to stream content (royalties and bandwidth) to users that are already paying someone else for the right to that content? With Tomahawk’s technology you can move towards broadcasting metadata that is fulfilled independently at each user (and what content they already have available to them) instead of paying to send them stuff they already have.

We see win-win-win-win opportunities and the path to breaking through the logjam of online music within our collective grasp.

Big idea? Indeed.

Disruptive? Hopefully.

Possible? We definitely think so.

If you like our vision, let us know. Let your friends know. Let your labels, artists and bloggers know. It’s time we all, as an industry, work towards the greater good and bring the tide in. The boats need floating.

Digital Music Trends Talks Tomahawk

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 08:05:05 -0400

Thanks to Digital Music Trends for talking to us for their 100th podcast episode. If you are interested in hearing more about Tomahawk’s past, present and future, these 24 minutes have you covered.

New Big Releases: Tomahawk (0.5) and Toma.hk

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 23:51:00 -0400

“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.