We briefly highlighted the Tomahawk media player earlier this month when they presented at the NY Music:Tech Meetup at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory. Eliot van Buskirk of evolver.fm wrote a much more in-depth piece on the application today. Check out an excerpt below…
First if not foremost, Tomahawk is a media player along the lines of iTunes or Winamp, which can play the music stored on your computer. The fun starts when you install Tomahawk’s content resolvers, which are basically plug-ins that can find music to play in a bunch of other different streaming services, using their search APIs (application programming interfaces) — Spotify, Official.fm, YouTube, Bandcamp, Grooveshark, and others.
Whenever you try to play a song, Tomahawk might use any combination of these sources to provide the audio. For playing your own locally-stored music, that’s a fairly useless feature. You already have the song, so why would you want to play it in Spotify instead? However, Tomahawk gets more useful when you’re trying to play stuff you don’t already have — for example, a playlist from a Tomahawk-using friend.
By downloading and installing these “content resolvers,” you can connect the Tomahawk music player to a wide variety of sources.
“When I want to play a song, or somebody sends me a song, they’re not sending me a song — they’re sending me the metadata about that song — artist, track, possibly the album,” explained Tomahawk open source contributor Jason Herskowitz. “Then, on my side, Tomahawk says, ‘Okay, out of all the content sources that you have access to, what’s the best match?’”
Read full story at evolver.fm
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