We have just pushed the new beta release 0.83 to the Play Store. Here's the change log:
- Overall performance improvements when syncing playlists in the background
- Fixed issues that caused playlists to not get synced
- Playlists and playlist entries now actually get deleted when hitting "delete"
- Album track-lists are now properly sorted by track number
- Fixed some UI glitches, improved design details
- Tracks can now also be resolved/searched for with GMusic
- Updated to latest version of Spotify Android SDK
- Several crashes have been fixed
For those of you who don't want to wait until the Play Store (which you get by joining the Google Play beta) pushes the update to your device:
http://download.tomahawk-player.org/nightly/android/tomahawk-android-release-arm-release-0.83.apk
Thanks a lot for constantly providing us with feedback. You guys help us out immensely! Keep the posts coming :)
Reposted from muesli’s blog: http://chris.de/?p=19458
Tomahawk 0.8.4 is out! For Windows and OS X this will be our last Qt4-based release. Support for Qt4 in git-master won’t be dropped unless there is a compelling reason to do so, but building with Qt5 is now recommended and the new default. If you prefer to stick to the old Qt version, simply run cmake with -DBUILD_WITH_QT4=ON as an additional argument.
At the same time we also started using features of C++11, which is now a requirement to build Tomahawk’s master branch.
Qt on OS X
This means our next major release will be Qt5-based across all platforms, and the Linux and Windows nightlies already work like a charm. OS X support is a different story though. While we appreciate all the Yosemite-related style updates in Qt5, we also suffer from a bunch of regressions and API changes. Support for unified toolbars is currently a no-op, QMacToolBar feels out of place in the Qt ecosystem and hence we still haven’t managed to port over some of our existing code that relies on adding widgets to the toolbar. A native Cocoa re-implementation of the toolbar exists, but that obviously doesn’t mix well with existing Qt widgets either. The infamous QMacNativeWidget is getting more broken with every new Qt release and since 5.4 it’s entirely unusable as it creates an empty window-border for every Cocoa widget you’re trying to embed.
OS X support in Qt feels heavily neglected and fragmented at this point. Yosemite (OS X 10.10) has been out for over a year now, and yet Qt4-based apps (just like Tomahawk 0.8) are all still struggling with various strange and critical issues on this platform: invisible checkboxes, cut-off buttons, broken text-alignment, focus issues, invalid SSL errors… the entire list of issues is a lot longer and well documented in Qt’s bug-tracker. Qt’s unique selling point has always been being the one true cross platform toolkit with a coherent API, and Digia needs to be careful to not drop the ball here.
I don’t want this post to turn into a long-winded Qt rant, though, since for the most part I still consider it a fantastic toolkit and its elegant API a joy to work with on a day to day basis. Without it, a team as small as Tomahawk’s simply wouldn’t be able to deliver a music player that runs across all major platforms. I’m also aware that Qt is an open project that everyone can contribute to. Our entire team is committed to open source and we try to upstream fixes and help out wherever we can. In the past months and years we have submitted various patches to projects like libVLC, libechonest, liblastfm, QuaZIP, qtkeychain, Lucene++, jreen, Snorenotify, BreakPad, libcrashreporter-qt and many others. We don’t have any real Cocoa or Objective-C experts on our team, though, and the issues we are currently facing on OS X aren’t exactly one-line fixes.
Onto 0.9
So what’s on the road-map for Tomahawk’s next major release? Compilation support and collection management will see some major improvements. You will finally be able to pick which release or version of an album you want to browse and play.
Tomahawk’s script plugins already put ES6 features like Promises to good use, which makes the plugins’ code much more readable and maintainable. It’s even possible to write entire info-plugins in JavaScript now, so anyone can easily extend Tomahawk’s ability to retrieve data – like charts, covers, similar artists and much more – from all kinds of online services, with only a couple of lines of code. No recompiling required and we can update those plugins online, independent of platform, arch and distribution, whenever a service’s API gets changed or extended.
In the audio-engine department we switched from Phonon to using libvlc directly. This means we have a level playing field across platforms and resolver developers can now rely on support for certain audio and stream formats (HLS, RTMP, YouTube).
Last but not least, a new TIDAL plugin is already available in git and an Amazon Music resolver is currently in development.
We hope to release 0.9 in May or June, as soon as the remaining OS X issues are resolved.
The obligatory change-log
* Fixed drag & drop issues on sidebar.
* Fixed starting Tomahawk with a filename as parameter.
* Update column view when collection changes.
* Performance improvements for collection browsing
* Improved memory footprint
* Show cloud collections above your friends in the sidebar
* Keep looking for alternative sources even when we found a perfect match
* Fixed crash in network code
* Fixed repeat one/all icons
* Be more lenient about accepting JSPF and M3U playlists
* Improved support for compilation albums
* (Linux) Don’t crash on environments with invalid locales.
* (Windows) Fixed support for Windows XP
* (OS X) Fixed settings dialog appearance on Yosemite
* (OS X) Fixed SSL errors on Yosemite
We’ve got a minor update to hold you over to our next major update (which is, itself, not too far away). Mostly it fixes some annoying bugs and continues to improve performance.
* Fixed drag & drop issues on sidebar
* Fixed starting Tomahawk with a filename as parameter
* Update column view when collection changes
* (Linux) Don't crash on environments with invalid locales
* Performance improvements for collection browsing
* Improved memory footprint
* Show cloud collections above your friends in the sidebar
* Keep looking for alternative sources even when we found a perfect match
* Fixed crash in network code
* Fixed repeat one/all icons
* Be more lenient about accepting JSPF and M3U playlists
* Improved support for compilation albums
* (Windows) Fixed support for Windows XP
* (OS X) Fixed settings dialog appearance on Yosemite
* (OS X) Fixed SSL errors on Yosemite
We also have a plug-in for Tidal in the works (which is available now if you are compiling the latest master branch from GitHub, but will be made available to everyone else soon).
Similarly to how you can drag & drop links from a number of music services into Tomahawk's desktop app to have them playback from your services/sources - it's even easier on Android. Just tap the links.
A quick overview of the basics: collections, connecting to music services, playlist/favorite syncing from Tomahawk on the desktop, local music and cloud collections. More tips & tricks for our Android app to come.
Tomahawk enables you to directly connect to your friends via the open-standard instant messaging protocol, Jabber (aka XMPP). This protocol is used by a range of companies/services including Google, Wordpress, DuckDuckGo, and others (https://tomahawk.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/428532-what-is-jabber-xmpp).
Once connected, you can view your friends' music & activity - as well as send and receive recommendations to each other.
Note: to directly connect to your friends you may have to configure your firewall and/or port-forwarding settings.
You can drop playlist links from multiple services (Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, Beats, etc.) into you queue or sidebar, but probably the easiest way currently to import your own Spotify playlists into Tomahawk is to just drag them from the Spotify desktop app into the Tomahawk desktop app....
Earlier we showed you how to import and subscribe to updating playlists. Here is a hack that shows you how to leverage that to import any Last.fm user's listening history.
We just pushed an update of the Android beta to Google Play. Among a number of performance improvements and bug fixes, we have also added the ability Track and Album views to your Collection, sort those views, and given you the ability to filter Artist and Album pages by whatever you may have collected already (across devices/services).
Listening to a song you love and want to check out a playlist of songs in the same vein? Just right-click on the song title to get to "Similar Tracks" to browse and play.
Subscribe to auto-updating playlists within Tomahawk. Spinbin turns webpages for lists such as "best new tracks", "top charts" and radio station playlists into .xspf-formated playlists. Just add them to Tomahawk and they will update regularly (hourly, daily or weekly depending on the type of playlist) and you will always have fresh new stuff to listen to in Tomahawk!
Similarly, XSPF Radios HQ has a great list of playlists you can subscribe to. Check them both out!
Tomahawk 0.8: Allow ourselves to reintroduce... ourselves.
TL;DR
We've redesigned Tomahawk (and so much more)!
The latest release of Tomahawk is now available for OS X, WINDOWS and LINUX.
A beta release of a brand new ANDROID app is now available.
More social features: Friend Feed and Inbox
Support for more streaming services and music sources
Add support for more languages (30 and counting), including the recently added: Danish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Albanian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Chinese (Taiwan).
This is our biggest release to date that, we believe, will help bring Tomahawk to the mainstream with a new design, a slew of new features and major usability improvements. While this release doesn't fully deliver on all of our redesign plans, we think it is a massive step forward for the project. More exciting features and usability improvements will come with future releases.
WHAT'S NEW
DESIGN/UX
Shiny new interface. Simplified.
MUSIC SERVICES / SOURCES
Beats Music support
Google Play Music (locker and on-demand streaming) support
Others (developers can easily create and distribute their own Content Resolvers - a number of which we don't ship with Tomahawk but can installed akin to the way browser extensions are distributed)
INBOX
Send, receive and forward tracks to your Tomahawk friends.
FRIEND FEED
Browse your friend's recently played tracks (grouped by user) and listen to what they've listened to.
UNIVERSAL MUSIC LINK SUPPORT
Drag and drop support for iTunes, Deezer, Beats Music, Rdio, Spotify, SoundCloud links - Tomahawk looks them up and then finds the best source for you to listen to those songs. On Android you can set Tomahawk to be the default app for all of those links - so just click to open and listen from your source(s).
NOTIFICATIONS
Now Playing notifications (OS X & Windows) - support for OS-level notification systems (e.g. Notification Center) with fallback to its own native notification system
NETWORKING / CONNECTIVITY
IPv6 Support to make directly connecting to your other computers and networks much easier and more reliable
ANDROID APP
Tomahawk on Android brings most of the desktop experience and benefits to your phone. Wirelessly sync playlists from your computer to your mobile device. Follow your friends and music influencers. Plug-in all of your music sources - including virtually all of the same content resolvers from the desktop version of Tomahawk plus Rdio and Deezer.
HATCHET
While the web app of Hatchet is not yet available to the public, users can get started by creating a Hatchet account which enables them to sync their playlists and favorites to their Android phone. Read more about the vision for Hatchet.
TOMAHAWK WEBSITE
Simpler & prettier - and hopefully easier to understand
Tomahawk is a new kind of music player that brings all of your streams, downloads, cloud music storage, playlists, radio stations and friends to the same party. It's about time they all finally get to mingle!
HOW IT WORKS
Tomahawk is basically a music metadata player. At its core it decouples the metadata about a song from the source and reassembles it for each user based on their individual music accessibility and rights. In short, given the name of a song and artist Tomahawk will find the right source, for the right user, at the right time. This fundamentally different approach to music enables a range of new music consumption and sharing experiences previously not possible.
WHAT THEY SAY
Earlier releases of Tomahawk have been heralded as:
"...the most important music app nobody's talking about. " - Wired
"... socially aware music player, that quite simply, is awesome." - Mashable
" ... the little guys showing the big companies how it should be done." - Music Ally
"... Tomahawk is gearing up to be a force to be reckoned with." - The Next Web
"While its concept is already incredibly revolutionary, the coolest parts might be that it’s also open-source and cross-platform." - MakeUseOf
"It's time to listen to music in a new way that might just blow your mind." - Evolver.fm
CORE USER BENEFITS
INTEROPERABILITY
Because you and your music influencers may have similar tastes in music, but not necessarily the same music services and sources. You can read emails sent from any app and any mail provider... shouldn't music be as easy to listen to and share?
Someone posts something about a song or artist that you want to check out. But it's a link or embed from a service that is not the one you use. What do you do? Don't click it? Click it and listen in an app that you don't use? Either way, it represents work for you - if you like it you have to go and search for it from your music provider and then add it to your collection so you can easily listen again.
Shouldn't it be easier? Wouldn't it be nice if a single music link or embed just "did the right thing" for each listener based on their music source(s), territories and preferences?
We think so, and that's one of the reasons we built Tomahawk. Just drag links or embeds from Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, SoundCloud, iTunes, Grooveshark and more into Tomahawk and watch it resolve and playback from your service... not theirs.
AGGREGATION
Lots of shops, still only one stop. Your music is everywhere, and now you don't have to be.
Your local mp3 library, the music libraries on your other computers, your music lockers, pre-release streams on SoundCloud, your playlists and collection on your subscription music service.
If you are like us, then you come across music you like virtually everywhere but are forced to have to think about where that music may be to get to it.
What if you didn't have to know, or care, where the music you love is... and just have it automatically - and seamlessly - play each track from the best location? Sounds like a lot less work, yeah?
It is less work... and it's another reason we built Tomahawk.
MUSIC CURATION AND DISCOVERY
Sure, it's about discovering new music you may love - but just as importantly - it's about being lazy.
We get it, sometimes you are actively on the hunt for new music or dying to turn other people on to the new music you just discovered. But more often than not you are just looking to hear "good music" while you go about your day.
Tomahawk makes it easy, no matter what mode of listening you are in. Create a custom radio station that can get as eccentric as your tastes, or as simple as a genre or a friend's listening history. Listen along to a friend that is currently listening to music and let them do the work... you hear what they play. Enjoy the latest charts from dozens of music services and data providers, right in Tomahawk. Import and collaborate on playlists from influencers you find on other music services - they don't have to change their behavior at all for you to benefit.
Find something great? Just love it or add it to a playlist and have those songs and playlists sync back to Last.fm and Spotify. We built Tomahawk to do a lot of complex stuff so you don't have to.
FEATURES
MULTI-SOURCE
In Tomahawk, you simply enable and add plug-ins (we sometimes call them "content resolvers") for all your favorite subscription music services, promotion platforms, networked libraries, lockers and more. If you are feeling a little ambitious - and know a little javascript - you can even write your own.
Whenever Tomahawk goes to play a song, it will find the best available version for you across all of your available sources.
SOCIALLY CONNECTED
Tomahawk users can directly connect to you other computers and friends via Jabber and Google Chat. Once connected you can view their friends' activity feed, browse and play their libraries, playlists and stations - or listen along to whatever they are listening to (from different sources if needed). Drag and drop songs to leave them in a friend's inbox.
CONTEXT RICH
Dive deep into the artist you love, or the artists you want to learn more about: discographies, bios, related artists, top tracks and more.
RADIO / STATIONS
Whatever a listeners in the mood for, Tomahawk's stations (powered by our friends at The Echo Nest) has the knobs and dials to find it. Easily spin up artist- and song-based stations just by dragging them onto "+ CREATE NEW STATION" in the app's sidebar.
Get as fiddly as you want by adding and tweaking additional parameters to tune your stations - genre, mood, musical key, danceability, popularity, user, geographic location and more.
CHARTS & NEW RELEASES
Browse what's hot across iTunes, Billboard, Hype Machine, Last.fm, Rdio, Spotify, This is My Jam and more. Get a sneak peek/listen at upcoming new releases. When you click play, you listen to those songs from your sources without ever having to leave Tomahawk.
PLAYLISTS +
Import playlists from other services (just drag and drop onto Tomahawk). Export playlists. Share playlists. Subscribe to dynamically updated playlists (.xspf). Sync your playlists to Tomahawk's android app (via Hatchet).
LISTENING HISTORY
Import your Last.fm listening history and "scrobble" all of your Tomahawk listening history back to Last.fm if you choose. The Android app even lets you capture and report your playback history from virtually any other Android music app.
SCREENSHOTS
BROWSE FRIENDS' MUSIC & LISTEN ALONG
INBOX - RECEIVED & FORWARDING
CHARTS - BILLBOARD'S TASTEMAKER ALBUMS
FRIEND FEED
DYNAMIC (AUTO-UPDATING) PLAYLIST
You can find a bunch of great playlists, charts and radio station play histories you can subscribe to on Spinbin.
PLUG-INS / RESOLVER SETTINGS
ANDROID - ARTIST PAGE
(EVEN) MORE READING
If you've made it this far and you still want to read more (?!) you can checkout our new FAQ for answers to more questions and/or to make feature requests.
A lot of fans of Tomahawk have been asking, “what are you guys working on?!” for quite a while. We know it seems like we’ve been relaxing a bit since our last Tomahawk release, but we can assure you we have most certainly been hard at work - and we can finally answer that question, with...
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.
