Tomahawk – A meta source music player | Hacker News Reader

Tomahawk – A meta source music player

tomahawk-player.org

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Hope you guys like it. We've got a major update in the works too, as well as an Android app. All free and open source.

Does it support local files?

It does, of course. You can mix your local library with Spotify, SoundCloud and many more.

Is it identifying song names by file metadata, binary fingerprints, audio fingerprints?

At the moment we are just supporting file metadata but we will hopefully add audio fingerprints soon.

AcoustID maybe?

It's currently identifying songs by meta-data only. There is an audio fingerprinter (using Last.fm's service) in the works, but as you can imagine that only solves part of the problem: getting fingerprints for data from all the various supported sources is a lot harder.

You may want to add a "local files" icon in the Multi-Source section of the home page.

I noticed if I search "Zappa" it only shows one album that have artist name exactly "Zappa".

Would be nice if it also showed the other albums by "Frank Zappa"...

I like the idea, would it be possible to add YouTube support (or does that maybe already exist)? (Of course, only playing the audio part and ignoring the video)

There is a working resolver here: https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk-resolvers/tree/m...

Mind you, it does require Tomahawk's latest nightlies / git version.

You can find pre-packaged versions of all our resolvers (updated nightly) here: http://teom.org/axes/nightly/ - just use "Install from file" in Tomahawk's settings and pick the .axe file.

Hello,

I have ticked the box that says use the Spotify service, but when I do a search, it doesn't find anything from Spotify. Am I missing something? Thanks

EDIT: Using Windows 7

i've never had success with spotify and tomahawk on windows. last time i tried, i could occasionally find stuff, but playback hardly worked.

That's a shame as that would be where most of my music came from.

If I hadn't already spent countless hours battling the Spotify API I'd attempt to help...

We love it as usual :) Good work.

You say it's open source?

Is there a link to where developers can learn how to help with development and or use the player for their own projects?

Sure, you can always find us on irc.freenode.net channel #tomahawk

MPD this is certainly not. But it's a neat way to discover music. Thing keeps crashing pretty randomly and I keep sending you the crash reports so hope that helps. The meta data discovery works nicely - which is what got me to try it out. Thanks!

Edit: I give up, one segfault too many - I just can't use it in this state. I ran it under gdb and the stack during the segfault is 78 calls deep - is making Qt applications like playing Jenga? I live in the world of embedded software so maybe I'm naive.

I really like the concept, but the software is totally broken in Linux. Not even adding files to a playlist works. The song names are in the playlist, but the files can't be found. The program crashes every time it's closed. And there's a problem with the default Ubuntu theme: Selected menu items have white text on a white background.

A few patches and it could be a great player.

Feel free to help out: https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk and we're available on #tomahawk on irc.freenode.net for better support/troubleshooting.

Thanks for the kind words. We've fixed the problem with the default Ubuntu theme and also have a bunch more design improvements, as well as general bug fixes which you can find in git (stable-0.8 and HEAD).

Not being able to resolve tracks at all sounds strange, though. Right now I would guess it's either a corrupted database or index. Could you try and see if you can reproduce the issue after wiping your settings / database? (~/.local/share/Tomahawk and ~/.config/Tomahawk)

I reset the settings. Still, using v0.7.0, the problem appears when I drag an artist or album name from the collection into the playlist to add all tracks at once. I get many greyed out song names then and the files can't be found. Can't really make out a pattern, as some files of an album will add fine and others with the same encoding won't.

Opening every album seperately with the arrow icons and dragging the songs directly into the playlist mostly works.

Dragging the mouse to "local" when adding to the playlist seems to work better, although it will still fail to add some albums, but I don't get all the greyed out entries (I think many of these are from automatic online sources, even though I don't have any online sources configured). The behaviour is definitely weird.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/07/03/awesome-desktop-music-...

"Playdar was really a headless, UI-less technology that could be leveraged by online sites and services to let users bring their own content to other people’s contexts.”

Why was Playdar not successful as standalone technology? It would seem applicable to a broad set of use cases for content-addressable data stores.

Calibre (also open-source, also Qt-based) has metadata plugins for various online ebook services. There's a growing number of browser extensions which overlay user data onto websites, many of these extensions would benefit from a widely-used content resolver that works in cross-domain (home, work, mobile1, mobile2, site1, site2) contexts.

I assume it just wasn't accessible enough for the average user to gain a bigger user-base. The technology behind it is still alive in Tomahawk, though, and you'll be able to use Tomahawk as a headless daemon (which you can control through a restful JSON-API) in the near future.

Hey, That sounds awesome, I am curious, how do you work with the providers (google, soundcloud and co ..) so that they can make some revenue ? (because you know these guys are just not streaming music for free ... Also I tried the web-app with a good album (Pixies - Doolittle) http://toma.hk/album/Pixies/Doolittle but all the songs in that albums are actually covers or remixes and none are the original Pixies version ... (probably what's happening when you look for "pixies debaser" in youtube or soundcloud. Anyway, the interface is super polished and cool, and I really like the idea of "having everything in one place" + jabber integration, there is really some major things to do with this, and there you are..

Afaik, Soundcloud makes its money from their artists, not listeners.

For subscriptions resolvers, users are required to be subscribers - so Tomahawk drives more users into subscription relationships.

My thought while trying version 0.7 (Windows)

Why is the Quick Launch Shortcut install option greyed out?

After install I, I tried playing a few files that I had just added, which was quick, from the "dashboard". Apparently my local files couldn't be found. Any log files available? Where does it think they are?

Many albums I have are by various artists yet you only seem read the artist field from the first file and treat that as the album artist.

You seem to have separation between the concepts of the library and the playlist, good. Unfortunately as soon as an item is played it is removed from the "queue".

Can I browse my "collection" in a different manner? At the moment it is a flat list of "artist" folders which seems to contain files not actually by the artist.

Any ReplayGain options available or planned?

At present I see no reason to discontinue using Winamp.

* Tomahawk relies on good metadata (that's how it matches to the best available source for each song), so if you are missing ID3 tags it won't import them into the library.

* You are right, we don't yet do a good job with various artists, but you may want to give our latest nightly a spin as it re-adds the flat view to the collection.

The queue works differently than Winamp - it injects songs into the currently playlist list and they then disappear once played. If you want a history of everything you have listened to you can get it from "History".

http://download.tomahawk-player.org/nightly/windows/tomahawk...

* As for ReplayGain, it is a bit problematic with the various sources we support, because we can't pre-analyze tracks. It's certainly on our roadmap, though.

Thanks for giving it a try.

Great idea, I used it with spotify and last.fr plugins on Windows), it takes 15s to start playing a song (from spotify) and changing the volume level takes few seconds (it feels like VLC a few versions ago, it seems to use the same libs).

Try the latest nightly, it should come with big improvements over the last release (including better playback on windows): http://download.tomahawk-player.org/nightly/windows/tomahawk...

Nice, I could reuse some of the sources one day, my "perpetual pet project " is a web audio player, with the same idea of unifying sources into the same interface.

Here's a screenshot of current version: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/177896/Capture-webplayer...

It's 100% client side (compiles to a html/js single page app), I have a separate optional server + client plugin to handle my local files.

Could this support a mechanism to tip/pay artists that is independent of the distribution channel, i.e. link song name to artist wallet (pay with data or cash) so artists can receive supplemental income & analytics data that is fan-direct? Or allow artists to sell virtual goods (similar to messaging stickers) or emoji to fans?

We're certainly looking into this idea, a bit of a Flattr for artists. I like it.

Why not use Flattr as a Flattr for artists?

I tried it a few months ago and liked it, but the android app wasnt ready.

And I didnt like that I couldnt save the songs I listened to any the device that I listened to them on - like a simple local cache. Whats the big deal with adding a "Download" or "Save" option...for any streams.

It would violate the terms of service of the various streaming APIs that Tomahawk hits.

I'd like to be able to plug in an open web directory as a source. (Found using the old "parent directory" "artist name") trick. I looked around, but couldn't find anything. Are there any resolvers out there that do this?

Tried it, but unfortunately it basically didn't work at all for me. Last.fm history download broke at 8%, all Spotify tracks were rendered unavailable after they played once, and soundcloud doesn't work.

If you're on linux switching your phonon backend may help. Try removing phonon-gstreamer and installing phonon-vlc.

Installed, got soundcloud and spotify installed on OSX Mavericks, set to full screen. Tried to play a song, got an audio device not available error. Turned off peer upnp and restarted. Crashes on load.

Soundcloud sadly does not work (anymore) with the latest release on OSX. This is already fixed in the latest nightly http://download.tomahawk-player.org/nightly/mac/Tomahawk-lat... We hope to release a new version with all the fixes soon.

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