Tomahawk lets you connect to a buddy's library if you share the same network. Getting Social Nearly every music service has some form of social networking capability, but Tomahawk lets you connect with others in a manner that's deeper than simply Tweeting or Facebooking a song link. Tomahawk also lets you create smart playlists based on parameters you set and custom music stations. Worse, Tomahawk returned a few awful, amateur covers from SoundCloud when I searched for Foo Fighters' 'Big Me' and Red Hot Chili Peppers' 'Breaking the Girl.' There was no way to distinguish them from the legitimate recordings, which proved vexing (or, depending on the level of awful, hilarious). The music quality was serviceable (not great) and there was a noticeable delay before the start of each track. That said, the music discovery and customization isn't as thorough as Slacker's slider-based options. Search for an artist and Tomahawk serves up an artist page that has a short bio, popular songs, and related artists so there is a music discovery element, too. I would've preferred a much tighter search engine to cut down on the clutter, but it still functioned reasonably well. A Red Hot Chili Peppers search showcased tracks not only the famous funk-rock band, but also from a few randoms that have 'Chilli' and 'Hot' in their names as well.

Tomahawk-despite its desire to want me to use accurate queries-returns rather loose results. Tomahawk didn't prevent me from firing up '7th Chamber,' but it did make me mindful of accurate band names.

For example, entering 'Wu Tang,' returned several 'Wu-Tang Clan' matches, but they were listed as bad matches because I didn't use the band's proper name. When you perform a search, Tomahawk scours your sources (both the music on your computer and stream music services you set up) for content and ranks the results on how closely they match your query. The Tomahawk Experience Still, the revolvers come in handy. Big names like MOG, Rdio, and Slacker are missing because, as Tomahawk states, 'many do not yet have public APIs.' People like me who've spent hours customizing Slacker have very little reason to make the leap to Tomahawk. A small icon to the right of each song highlights the music source. You can listen to the music on your hard drive, but the magic occurs when you allow Tomahawk to tap Last.FM, Spotify, Grooveshark, and other free and subscription-based services by installing 'revolvers' (Tomahawk's name for the music plug-ins) from with-in the app. The left column offers easy access to your playlists, search history, favorited ('Loved') tracks, hot songs ('Charts'), and other categories. Tomahawk has a familiar paned, iTunes-like interface.

Slacker radio reviews