It just plays (and sometimes blogs)
Tomahawk links (http://toma.hk) are just as easy to give as they are to receive.
Giver: just right-click and copy the link to your clipboard for pasting anywhere you see fit. (like this cool song from Work: http://toma.hk/Fwcaaaab or this Indie Station - aggressive in mood, at least 186 bpm, and medium song “hotttnesss”)
Receiver: just click the link and listen.
Easy.
While it can be gratifying to dig around and discover new stuff on your own, often it’s nice to just sit back and let a friend DJ for you. That’s why we have made it really easy for you to just “listen along” to whatever your friends are currently listening to.
Multiple people can listen along with you, and you can just as easily listen along to someone who is listening along to someone else.
Feeling a little self-conscious about what you’re listening to, or just want a little privacy? Just “listen privately” to make your behavior invisible (to both your friends and last.fm).
Queues can provide huge usability advantages that enable more seamless listening experiences, but for some reason have long been forsaken my some popular media players (yeah, I’m looking in Cupertino’s general direction). For example, if you are listening to something and you come across something you want to listen to next - but without having to create a playlist (then going back and cleaning it up) or interrupting your flow. Now with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ you are bombarded by links to songs and playlists from services that you very well may not belong to. What if you could just as easily drag Spotify, Rdio and iTunes links into your queue and have them play back from whatever *your* available sources are? Now you can!
Happy Thanksgiving and happy listening!
You know those times when you come across a track and you think, “man, I’d like to make a playlist of a bunch of other songs from that artist/album but I’m not really up for all the click-click-search-drag it inevitably requires right now”? Well, we’ve got you covered with a little feature we like to call “Lazy Lists”. Don’t worry, there is no shame in being lazy when creating playlists… they have often required far more effort when then should. Or at least we think so. Behold!
Don’t just be lazy with tracks, you can also be lazy by dragging/dropping artists and albums too. So go ahead, put you’re feet up and let Tomahawk do the dirty work.
We love open-standards. Data portability, or more accurately the lack thereof, is becoming an increasing problem for users across a wide range of services. The one that we are particularly passionate about is playlist portability. How often have you created a playlist only to have to recreate it again when you switch music services or players? Yeah, us too. It sucks. Or if you want to share a playlist with a friend that uses a different service/player than you? Good luck. Not to go off on a rant, but if your music service/player doesn’t support the .xspf playlist format - ask for it. You should own your own data, and playlists that you create and curate should be able to be exported (and imported) everywhere. So, today’s feature spotlight is focused on importing and subscribing to .xspf playlists from across the web.
If you want to give it a spin with last.fm, you can give the hack I showed in the videoa spin. Or just manually enter them using last.fm’s syntax:
Just replace “jherskowitz” with the last.fm username of your choice. You can also play around with replacing “toptracks.xspf” with “recenttracks.xspf” or “recentloved.xspf”. Meanwhile, if you know of any services or sites that are exposing playlists as .xsfp, let us know… we’d love to promote them too.
This one is one of the basics, but really powerful when it comes to they way you navigate and program your listening experience in Tomahawk. Artist and Album pages. By leveraging APIs and data from great sources such as Rovi, MusicBrainz and Last.fm (in addition to your networked friends) we are able to present robust information about tens of millions or artists and hundreds of millions of albums. Take a look…
Created during a recent Music Hackday, this feature (once enabled) sends information about your collection to The Echo Nest so that a personalized station can be created based on those “seeds”. By adding some “adventurousness” the songs added to the station will come from beyond that collection. You can create User Radio stations for yourself, and any of your friends that have also enabled the feature.
Like all stations, you can add and tweak more station parameters to fine tune it as well as “steer” it while it’s playing. Enjoy!
One of my favorite new features are the integrated, playable, charts from sources like Billboard, iTunes, We Are Hunted, Spotify, Ex.fm, Hype Machine and Rdio. They update regularly, and prove to be a great jumping off point (for me at least) to get listening to something before i think spin-off to other stuff.
Just use the breadcrumb drop downs to find the song, album or artist chart (from multiple countries) to get started. When you hear stuff you like, don’t forget to “love” it or drag it to a playlist so you can easily find it again.
One of the features that people keep telling us they love are the customizable stations that users can create. Just give it one or more parameters, then let it go out and find the right tracks from all of the sources you are connected to. Check it out in action, then give it a whirl yourself. It’s addictive. Enjoy!
I get that the concept of Tomahawklet, while simple, can be confusing to some for the sole reason that people just aren’t used to things “just working” like that. See what a decade of using media players that weren’t designed to operate in a web world will do to you? So, for our first “tip & trick” I’ve made a quick screencast to demonstrate just how Tomahawklet works in conjunction with Tomahawk. (Disclaimer: the audio is not very good on this screencast. I promise to make them better in the future.)
Check out the list of currently supported sites. Have ideas for others, let us know over in the forums, or better yet check out the project on Github and write your own custom Tomahawklet scrapers!
