Reposted from: http://blog.webfwd.org/post/20606871266/tomahawk-social-media-player-joins-webfwd

We are excited to announce that Tomahawk - the multi-source social media player - is joining Mozilla's WebFWD portfolio. “Wait…”, you say, “isn’t Tomahawk a desktop application? What does it have to do with the web?”

Hey, we are glad you asked. Yes, Tomahawk is indeed a cross-platform (Windows/OS X/ Linux) open-source music application. One, in fact, that breaks down the content silos that hinder cross-service and cross-territory social music experiences. Tomahawk does this by decoupling music metadata from its file source. When I share a song with you, your instance of Tomahawk finds your best available source to fulfill that play request - whether it’s your local library, a remote library, a subscription music service, or music promotion platform. This approach not only empowers music data portability by operating as a translation layer between services, it also ensures that your playlists are owned by you and can be fulfilled by any and all music sources available to you.

Once we are all able to speak the same raw musical language (metadata), what about all that rich context scattered across the web? Well, Tomahawk has a web server, API, and authentication mechanism built-in. Bloggers, writers, curators, reviewers and everyone else can write about and curate music without having a way to provide the files/streams.

Today there was a lot of buzz about Spotify's embeddable play button.  There is a lot to like about it, but the one thing most people seemed to take issue with was that it only worked if you had Spotify installed and were in a region of the world where Spotify is actually available.  So, based on the work we already did recently on toma.hk, @sydlawrence has now gone and made it embeddable too. 

All you have to do is head over to toma.hk, enter a song and artist name, and we'll handle the rest.  Or just right click and track in Tomahawk and copy the toma.hk link.  If the person that runs across a toma.hk player widget has Tomahawk installed, then it will leverage any, and all, of their available content resolvers (including Spotify) to play it back within Tomahawk.  If they don't have Tomahawk, no worries... it will try to match to a subset of available sources online so they can play it back directly in-page with no install required.  Granted, those running Tomahawk will have a better chance of finding a good source for the song since it leverages more sources, including local and remote libraries.  Plus you can do all sorts of other cool stuff with it inside of Tomahawk -  like build a station based on that song, add it to a playlist, and more - but hey, we know some of you just want to hit play and be on your way.

You can see what Syd says about it over on his blog too.

Introducing our (admitedly late) entry for Music Hackday - Amsterdam... toma.hk.  Toma.hk is an easy way to share links to songs that work for virtually everyone, not just people that use the same music service that you do.  Instead of sharing a link to a specific instance of a song that your friends may, or may not, have access (or rights) to - you instead share a toma.hk link that lets the person following the link to decide where the song is fulfilled from.

When you land on a toma.hk song page it will attempt to resolve the song against a wide range of content resolvers (the same resolvers used internally by Tomahawk). If you have Tomahawk installed, when you click the play button it will add the song to your Queue and play it once your currently playing song is done.

If you don't have Tomahawk installed, then it will resolve to the next best source and try to play it back directly in-page (or for Spotify tracks will launch Spotify).

You will always know what to expect by noting the service icon that is displayed on the artist/album image.  If you'd prefer one of the secondary sources then just click the link for icon for that source.

There are a few ways you can create and share toma.hk song links:

1.  Go to toma.hk and just type enter an artist name and song title

2.  Right-click on any song in Tomahawk, "Copy Track Link" and share

Things have been heating up a bit lately thanks to all the great press we've been from the likes of Evolver.fm, Wired, Gizmodo, Cult of Mac and Lifehacker - not to mention all the international coverage starting to come in from Taiwan to Greece to Austria to Russia.  Our gratitude comes to you in the form of Tomahawk 0.4... and as one would expect from the version number we think it's our best yet (it wouldn't make much sense to do it the other way, eh?).

The first thing you may notice is the new sidebar layout that better groups and organizes your available content, but under the hood is where most of the elbow grease was spilt this time around.  Most notably, content resolves faster than before - as well as loads of other performance optimizations, UX improvements and bug fixes (view changelog).

While the guys are hard at work under-the-hood getting 0.4 ready, I thought I'd share a simple little hack that I did at Music Hackday in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago... an easy way to recreate all your Pandora stations within Tomahawk.  

The beauty of Tomahawk is that it can make simple little hacks seem impressive (since Tomahawk is actually doing all the heavy lifting). Below you can see the backstory and links to it (yeah, the wiki entry pasted below took longer to write than the hack itself).   One of the things we are focused on right now is how to make Tomahawk easier for "normal people"... this includes doing a lot of cleanup around setup and getting started.  This little hack was inspired by that focus.

Make Up Recs

This is an admittedly lame-ass attempt to make up for two transgressions against my family...

If you use the great/free global OS X shortcut, search and launcher app, Alfred, then this is for you. 

Already using Alfred?  Then just click to install.

UPDATE:  until the new search results are launched, you will get better results by searching for a song name than an artist.

Sometimes when you are navigating around it's nice to have a quick link back to your currently playing playlist or station.  Just click the song link in the play controls and whisper three times - "there's no place like home".  Or...  just click the link.

Footnotes are basically what they sound like... only cooler.  Whatever track you have highlighted will update the Footnotes pane (when open) to display contextually relevant information to that artist.  Think of it as a really easy way to get to an Artist page, but without all that clicking.  

You can also stuff out of Footnotes and into playlists just like you do from everywhere else.