Tomahawk Music Player: Play Tracks Locally or Stream from Multiple Music Services

Tomahawk is a free, cross-platform and open source music player that combines your local library of music with those of several popular music streaming services like Spotify, Grooveshark, SoundCloud, Last.fm, YouTube and more to offer a unified music listening experience. And it doesn’t stop there – by hooking up with your Jabber or Google account you can play music from your friends’ libraries too, provided they’re also running Tomahawk.

When playing music from your local computer, Tomahawk behaves like a normal audio player. It will scan your computer for music files and build a library of the same, offering easy access modes like search and filter. It supports playlist, shows album cover and all other stuff that is staple of any music player. The fun starts when you want to play music that is not in your collection.

Using so called ‘content resolvers’, which are basically plug-ins, Tomahawk can find and play music from a bunch of different streaming services. The ones currently supported are Spotify, Grooveshark (accounts required), YouTube, SoundCloud, Jamendo, Official.fm, Last.fm, Ex.fm, Dilandau, OwnCloud and even the file sharing/hosting site 4shared. It also plays music from your local network.

Whenever you try to play a song, Tomahawk might use any combination of these sources to provide the audio. The player is based upon the idea that users just want to listen to music. The location of the track, which could be stored online or locally, is of no concern. The increasing popularity of music streaming services proves that this is indeed a fact.

Tomahawk allows the user to access all albums currently topping the charts on different music services like iTunes, Billboard, HyperMachine, Rdio and more.

With Tomahawk users can create playlists combining all the music they have access to, whether it’s stored locally on their computer or in the cloud, or even on their friend’s computer. When playing from your friend’s library, Tomahawk simply sends the metadata of the songs, and the player then finds the best match from the available content sources. This way you don’t actually stream music from your friends’ PC and suck their bandwidth. The cross-platform nature of Tomahawk also removes the OS barrier. It doesn’t matter whether you friend is running Linux or Windows or OS X. Tomahawk is available on all three.

Tomahawk includes a unique feature that allows users to create radio stations from their playlist, which they can broadcast to their friends so that they can listen along in real time.

Yet another unique feature of Tomahawk is the ability to create playlist based on mood, tempo, duration, style, loudness, song/artist hotness, key and even latitude and longitude. For example, you can choose a tempo of at least 40 BMP, or key of C sharp, or loudness of 80dB, and Tomahawk will scour the Internet for matching tracks. You don’t know what you may end up with, and this is a great way to discover new music.

Go ahead, download Tomahawk and give it a try.

You might also like Clementine Music Player.