Tomahawk cruises to version 0.5

Tomahawk plays music from a variety of different sources

The developers of the open source Tomahawk media player have announced the release of Tomahawk 0.5 and a new version of the accompanying Toma.hk online service. Tomahawk is an open source music player that includes sharing functionality and is designed to be source-independent. New features in Tomahawk 0.5 include a new grid view for albums, and redesigned artist and track pages. The new version can also bi-directional sync playlists with Spotify and Last.fm. New media key controls have been added for Windows and Linux.

Tomahawk lets users share the songs they are listening to via Jabber, gTalk and Twitter. Friends can then use these links to play the song from the library of the person posting it. Tomahawk is source-agnostic and supports a large number of different music sources, including local files, cloud storage systems, and music services like Spotify, SoundCloud and Jamendo. It also plays songs from YouTube, iTunes and Subsonic. The player can pull information on charts, albums, individual songs and new releases from Billboard, Last.fm and MusicBrainz. It combines all of these sources of music and information into a single library.

The Toma.hk online service has also been revamped; it now serves as a web interface to the user's music library and includes the same social interaction features as the desktop client. Users can play music right from the web interface and browse songs and albums in their collection. The web site can interact with the Tomahawk client and users can push songs to the online playlist from the player.

Tomahawk 0.5 is licensed under the GPLv3 and can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and several different Linux distributions (including Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint) from the project's web site. The source code for the application is available on GitHub and more information about the latest release can be found in the detailed change log.

(fab)