Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link to songs with ease, from multiple sources.
Constructed at Music Hack Day Sydney, the embeddable version of Toma.hk does essentially the same thing as Spotify’s new music player for the web – except it works across a bunch of different services, including not only Spotify but also Rdio, SoundCloud, Deezer, Last.fm, ex.fm, official.fm, jamendo, and dilandau. That means the tracks can play even for users who don’t have Spotify installed.
Search Toma.hk (created by Lawrence and other members of Team Tomahawk) for an artist and song, and you’ll receive not only a unique URL for that song, suitable for posting on Facebook or any other text-based communications medium, but also HTML code you can paste anywhere such code is used, like so:
It just works, despite all the complicated machinery happening behind the scenes.
“One thing that I’ve noticed at this weekend is that… everyone is using a different [music] service,” said Lawrence. “So I created a simple Toma.hk track-playing API. It’s really simple to use to play a track… just give it an artist name and a track title, and that’s literally all you need to do.”
He was addressing the other developers in the room, suggesting that they can build services that hook into Toma.hk using its API in order to deliver music from multiple services within their apps. Now that this API is available, we expect to see plenty of blogs and apps incorporating it, because it’s such a simple way to draw music from multiple sources for fans to enjoy.
But it’s not just for developers and music bloggers. You can also use Toma.hk as a simple web app for playing just about any song, even if you don’t know an API from your elbow.
