Tomahawk Joins Mozilla's WebFWD to Make Music Universally Available on the Web

Tomahawk, the innovative music player that aims to make music universally available by relying on as many web sources as possible, has joined Mozilla's WebFWD program. WebFWD was created to foster open source projects that helped push the web forward.

Projects that get accepted have access to resources and guidance from Mozilla and the people surrounding the organization.

"We are excited to announce that Tomahawk - the multi-source social media player - is joining the WebFWD portfolio," Tomahawk's J Herskowitz wrote.

"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," he added.

"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," he explained.

Tomahawk looks like a classic media player, but its unique feature comes from the fact it can play music from a variety of sources, the local library, YouTube, Spotify, Grooveshark and other services.

What's more, it doesn't really matter where the music comes from, the player only keeps metadata about songs in playlists and uses that metadata to search the web for a source any time you want to play a song.

The player is just one end, Tomahawk also runs Tomahawklet JavaScript bookmarklet that enables users to create playlists from many pages on the web, and toma.hk, a method of sharing music that doesn't rely on any single source for the actual song.

But the project is still in the early days and it's quite ambitious, to bridge the gap created by the various music services around which work in some countries, but not in others and by the fact that different people may subscribe to different streaming services.