14 DAY TRIAL // Tomahawk is a new type of music player that aims to change the way we think about this kind of applications. It's not very different from the rest, but some of the features it sports are unique. We'll take a closer look to see if it's really all that revolutionary.
Music players, Linux has more than enough of those. There are at least a dozen of very good music players and they all compete for the first place, which is currently undecided.
As usual, not all of the apps do exactly what you need from them and none of them is perfect. So, in such a crowded ecosystem, you might wonder what a developer team could do that hasn't been done before.
The answer to that is pretty simple, if you think about it. A lot of the current music players being used by the Linux community have some sort of integration with the cloud, with plugins and add-ons.
So, all that remains is to continue this integration until it's hard to distinguish where the app ends and where the API for a particular music service begins. This is the sort of place for Tomahawk.
Installation
We installed Tomahawk in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and everything runs smoothly. The devs do provide binaries for all kinds of distributions, including the source code, so basically any Linux user will be able to install it. We'll further give you the instructions for Ubuntu 14.10, but if you have another distribution, you can find the appropriate binary packages on the official website.
In order to install Tomahawk, you will need to add a PPA to the system, which is a fairly simple thing to do. Just open a terminal and enter the following commands (root is required):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tomahawk
Usage and Features
Users will immediately notice that Tomahawk doesn't have a regular interface and that it requires a little time to adapt to it, but once that learning stage has been completed, what to do with it will be as clear as water.
First of all, users need to understand that this is more of a cloud music player, meaning that you will have to choose the services that you plan to use from the options section. There are a lot of them, some more famous than others and you can select them all. A number of those, like Grooveshark for example, will need login credentials, but most don't require any kind of account.
The application allows users to listen to any song they wish, from online sources, without the need of a local library. This doesn't mean that you can't use your local music library. In fact, you can use this application to look for more songs like the ones you already have.
Besides the basic music functions like play, stop, shuffle, and so on, which don't really need detailing at all, there are quite a few interesting features. For example, in the left-hand side you will find an entry called Charts, where you can see what some of the top songs right now are. There is also an entry called New Releases, which should be very helpful in finding music that was just made available.
This brings us to the Inbox option, which might seem a little out of place in a music player, but the app is capable of connecting people. This would allow the user to listen to a friend’s music list or to listen to the same song.
Other cool features include History (even for shuffled songs), stations lists, Favorites, and the ability to right-click on a song in the library and look for other similar ones online. This alone lets users find new music that they might like.
