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The future is bright

alonetone is an independent music platform, allowing musicians to host and distribute their music in a non-commercial, easy-to-use environment.

alonetone launched in January 2008 (around the same time as soundcloud).

As of 2020, we host 80,000 tracks from 6500 musicians in production. We have delivered over 5 million mp3s to real listeners (not google and spambots, we are strict about excluding em!)

Bug reporting

We use Github Issues to submit bugs and keep track of our work.

Our goal?

To create and run the best online home a musician could want to have. To provide them with the tools they need to reach listeners and network with other artists — without the stank of commercialism, startup flava, ads, growth hacking motives, etc.

We strive to build:

• An easy to use, straightforward, intuitive, and consistent interface. Grandma-friendly (Yes, my grandma does use alonetone).
• Attractive to look at. UI-first feature building. Designer always involved.
• An open-source rails app that is easy to setup, adheres to best practices and can serve as good example.
• Practical, useful tools and services for musicians — without too much clutter and junk (no facebook integration, etc)
• Encourage artist exploration and a sense of community: encouragement to stick around vs. cliqueyness
• It does not overwhelm folks with TMI (too much information) or TMO (too many options) or TMF (too many features).

New Features must prove themselves and obey the above principles — not just be built because it sounds cool or would be fun to hack on. We have said "no" to many "intuitive" or "easy" features like threaded comment replies because they would compromise or distract from the above goals.

For more info on alonetone, visit the alonetone faq

Current stack

• Rails 6.0.2
• Sidekiq for jobs
• Active Storage for file storage on s3
• Fastly for CDN and image thumbnailing
• Stimulus js
• Howler js for Audio playback

Current feature set

• Unlimited mp3 uploads for musicians
• Creation of playlists / albums
• MP3 streaming and download (powered by amazon s3)
• Artist browsing
• Track browsing
• Tracking of listens
• One-way commenting system (No inline replies. No threaded comments. No DMs.)

Nomenclature and Historical Baggage That Can And Should Change

• The Asset model refers to an mp3
• Track is an entry in a Playlist
• Playlists are either albums or mixes, depending on what's inside them
• A user has one favorites playlist, which gets added to when you "heart" things
• The home page is assets#latest
• Too many views are in shared/

Want to deploy alonetone on your own server?

It won't work unless:

• You know ruby on rails well (Been doing it for more than a few months).
• You have deployed rails applications before, and are comfortable with that.
• You are willing to spend 20+ hours removing our branding and logo and site-specific code.

We get a LOT of requests from people asking if we can help them setup this "script" because they want an alonetone for a certain region of the world, or in another language.

Please understand that alonetone is open-source as an educational tool, to encourage collaboration, and for transparency. It is not intended as a white-label solution. If you are serious about getting your own copy in production, it's going to take lots of work (100+ hours).

If you still decide to try, keep in mind we are unable to provide ANY support

Want to help make alonetone.com awesome?

Sweet, now we are talkin'!

First, sign up for an account and start digging in.

Second, hop into our Slack chat room or email us at support@alonetone.com

Thirdly, fork away on Github.

Setup alonetone locally on macOS

• Clone this repo git clone REPO_GIT

• brew install libsndfile lame (required for id3 tags and waveforms)

• brew install vips (required for processing images)

• brew install yarn (required for building assets)

• Install gems bundle install

• Install front-end dependencies yarn install --check-files

• To create needed config, database, and load db/seeds*: rake setup

• Create and seed database rake db:setup

• rails s

*Note: alonetone uses 3 config files that are created by 'rake setup

alonetone.yml (contains the application "secret" and app-specific settings)

database.yml

newrelic.yml (for performance tracking)

Issues and workaround:

• No sound on development? Set play_dummy_audio: true in alonetone.yml
• Seeing the following yarn error?

  Your Yarn packages are out of date!
  Please run `yarn install` to update.

Make sure you have the latest version of npm and node.

brew install yarn
yarn install

Optional installs

The frontend code can take advantage of MorphSVGPlugin for more fluid SVG animations. If you have access to the plugin you can replace the stub file in app/javascripts/animation/ to use the plugin.

Logging in

After the bootstrap data is loaded, you can login using the test account. Username is "admin" and password is "testing123"

After login, click on the "Upload" button to upload your first mp3.

License

The alonetone source code is released under the MIT license.

"alonetone", "alonetone.com" and the alonetone logos are copyright Sudara Williams 2008-2020 and may not be used without permission.