Cool Desktop Apps for Linking All Your Music Services Together
By Jason Epstein
If you’re like a lot of people, you want all your music at your fingertips at any given point in time. The creators of music source meshing desktop apps Tomahawk and Music Control understand this and have offered up a way that allows you to seamlessly bounce between playing music from a variety of sources, linking your iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and more together.
Tomahawk allows you to plug all your subscription services, networked libraries and online data repositories together. When Tomahawk looks for a song, it searches all your available content, both local and via cloud, and plays it from the best available source, though it’s not clear if “best” means the fastest to get playback on, the highest quality, or a mix. You can also connect to friends via Google chat, Twitter, and more to browse and play selections from their music libraries, sample their stations, and check out their customized playlists. Tomahawk also hooks you up with music charts, information on new releases, and the ability to make custom radio stations.
Even without downloading Tomahawk’s program, you can check out a cool area of their website where you can look up a song either by entering info into a regular search feature or by pasting in a link from Spotify, Rdio, or Deezer. I looked for the most obscure thing I could think of, a tiny band called Manic Subsidal from the mid-80s that eventually turned into The Offspring and found a solid half-dozen songs and live performances. Impressive.
The Tomahawk app is easy to navigate, with a plethora of customizable options and features that allow the user to make playlists and cultivate their music collections across everything from YouTube to SoundCloud. The interface is user-friendly and it will be interesting to see what the program is like once out of its Beta phase.
I’ll get this right out of the way first; Music Control is currently for Mac only. It also costs $5 instead of being free. It acts like Tomahawk, streamlining the playback process for Pandora, iTunes, Rdio, and Spotify into one app. Installation is a simple process and its lay-out is conducive to getting what you want quickly and efficiently. 20% of the profits go to VH1 Save the Music Foundation which was founded to bring music education back to public schools that don’t have the budget for it.
Though Music Control contributes to a great cause, it not for Windows and it’s not free. Tomahawk, on the other hand, is still in its Beta phase so it isn’t as slick looking as Music Control, but already it links through a ton more services than Music Control. For now, we’re going to recommend Tomahawk, though we’d also urge you to keep an eye out for subsequent release versions of each of these innovative music players that seek to amplify your music listening experience.
