All about alonetone

Hi there!

After a quiet january and february, alonetone is getting some development love.

I just came back from Vienna where Samo and I hashed out the UI design for the upcoming secret project.

Here's what I just pushed out on alonetone:

• You can now see who everyone follows
• You can now easily add favorites to playlists
• The beginnings of a press page
• A few IE7 bugs fixed
• Playlist editing and track adding was...cleaned up a bit
• A handful of minor changes here and there
• Upgrading to the latest version of Rails and jQuery

Let me know if anyone sees any issues.

We're humming along at a good clip, track uploads are looking scarily...'exponential' on the stats page.

Welcome to all you n00bs - be sure to speak up on the forums if you have questions and suggestions.

Yeah, and if you wanna get creative with the alonetone logo for some strange reason, check out the press page with 8 different versions of the logo in 3 different formats.

Yeah....that's it for now. Time to enjoy all the good music that's landed here recently.

It's been an amazing month at alonetone, in part thanks to the RPM challenge which many alonetoners participated in as well as brought many new faces to alonetone.

For those who don't know about it, the challenge is to record / produce a full album within February. Kind of like the 24 hour album but in a month. :)

In the last week alone, more than 1000 new songs were added to alonetone. New signups were on the rise, and new tracks were flying by at a rate too quick to listen to:

To the all the new faces: Welcome! It's going to be an incredible month catching up with all the new music here.

In honor of all the hardworking musicians who completed their album, we've put together a page listing all of your albums:

It's going to be a great spring for alonetone. I'm back in action maintaining the site (after taking Feb off for cough music making) and the rumors regarding the upcoming secret project - well, they are all true.

Enjoy listening to all the great music produced during February and cheers to the new guys for hanging out with us on alonetone. Have fun!

This is what alonetone looked like 1 year ago.

Alonetone wasn't really "launched" in the hyped web 2.0 popular way. It just kinda slid out. irwinnormal was the first to play with it in December 2007. I emailed a few friends. I broke uploading, went on christmas vacation, came back. It was January 2008 when things first got rolling.

So, it's been a year! Over 4000 tracks uploaded by over 400 musicians. We've delivered over 230,000 tracks. Yes, A chunk of those went to the greedy spider invasion of mid 2008, but it's safe to say we're pumping out the tunes. We're just the right size. Not to big, not too small.

Thanks to everyone who signed up in 2008 and uploaded their tunes. A extra-HUGE thanks to everyone who suggested ideas, let me know when something broke, listened to my rants and answered my obscure and detailed questions - I'm looking at glu and ACL especially. Each piece of feedback helps us build what we humbly hope to be the most kicking-assiest place to host music at. Thanks guys.

Also, this site would be nothing without the genius of Samo Korosec aka smoofles who provided the original and the current alonetone design, consistently delivered top notch ideas and psd files, travelled 6 hours from Vienna on multiple occasions to help out, provided endless user interface handholding over IM, and in general gave me the best 'working together' experience I've ever had on a web app. Thanks Samo.

Oh, and I cooked up a new years treat last night! Try following a musician you like. Look for the 'follow' button on the top right of anyone's alonetone page. It looks like this:

alonetone will email you when that musician uploads a new track. You'll also see a list of tracks from the folks you follow on the alonetone home page. (Yes, we'll have a 'view all' button soon!)

Enjoy!

You know what is nice about vacation?

Having enough time to be human, be with the family, and also being able to sneak off into my room and get long-awaited alonetone features into production and long-standing bugs wiped off my plate.

Highlights for this round of updates:

1. Upload a new version of a track. That's right. It's finally here. Nothing fancy, just the ability to completely replace a track. It'll delete the old version from our servers. This is ideal for waking up the day after you toiled all night on a track and realize that the mix was a bit...how shall we say....off? Simply edit the track, choose your shiny new mix and no one will be the wiser.

2. Comments and forum posts will now obey your return key. That's right, no more strange formatting! Things that you type into alonetone will appear as you typed them, which really should have happened to begin with, but hey.

3. No more facebook integration. The largest of our resident 'elephants in the room' - the ability to browse alonetone music on facebook and add it to your profile - is now completely removed from alonetone. Yup, this loss of a feature is a very good thing for alonetone - it means I get to stop trying to keep up with their crazy changing system and focus on core alonetone. For those of you who want to add your tracks to your profile, fear not - this is all built into facebook anyway, and the alonetone facebook app was really just a lump of redundant code that was making development more difficult and bulky.

Hmm, lets see...I hammered out like 10 more bug fixes that were outstanding. Still about 20 more to go, but good progress has been made.

Oh, and don't forget to speak up if you want some alonetone guitar pics. Supplies are limited, especially in the thin department.

Hi there,

Migration to engine yard went as planned, though it took a bit longer than expected.

The site should be faster and smoother.

Enjoy!