Introducing Tonal – A Minimalist Music App for Collectors and Audiophiles

[baoshan]

Hello, members of Computer Audiophile Forum!

 

I’m the founder of International Classical Music Database, a non-profit organization exists to promote, educate, and archive classical music (don’t panic, the discussed topic is not limited to classical music).

 

We are looking for some pilot users for a new online service. If you’re a music collector or audiophile with a Mac computer, I believe our new solution “Tonal” could bring you a better music experience:

 

With Tonal, your complete digital collection is organized in one place and is ready to be streamed anytime, anywhere. That may sound unfancy, but there’re three foundational innovations which clearly differentiate the Tonal experience from the competition:

1. A managed cloud-based music locker service with audio quality verification built-in.
2. An innovative metadata solution which focuses on standard, quality, and community collaboration.
3. A well-crafted playback engine which ensures highly predictable audiophile performance.

 

Download initial version:

http://binaries.ton.al/app/Tonal-20180315.zip

 

Anyone interested please read the introduction article:

https://medium.com/tonal-app/introducing-tonal-74c748f200b9

 

And three separate articles explaining its internals:

1. Audio Pre-Processing
2. Music Metadata
3. Playback Engine

 

This thread will be monitored. Feel free to ask me any question.

 

Screenshots attached:

 

[ases]

Congrats on launching such an ambitious project! I have 3 questions:

• What license do you plan to use for community contributed metadata? I'm currently a Musicbrainz contributor, and I'm willing to do so because Musicbrainz releases its data to public domain.
• You stated that Tonal doesn't want to rely on 3rd party decoders on macOS, and the initial version seems to use FLAC. However, FLAC has no support for 32bit fixed/floating point PCM audio, and AFAIK no macOS built-in decoder support DSD. How do you plan to support these formats?
• What is your business model? I can see my music files being uploaded to Amazon AWS, and the cost of storing large amount of lossless/hires audio files on the cloud and streaming them on demand is by no means low. How do you afford the cost while being non-profit?

[jventer]

Very interesting

[baoshan]

18 hours ago, ases said:

Congrats on launching such an ambitious project! I have 3 questions:

• What license do you plan to use for community contributed metadata? I'm currently a Musicbrainz contributor, and I'm willing to do so because Musicbrainz releases its data to public domain.
• You stated that Tonal doesn't want to rely on 3rd party decoders on macOS, and the initial version seems to use FLAC. However, FLAC has no support for 32bit fixed/floating point PCM audio, and AFAIK no macOS built-in decoder support DSD. How do you plan to support these formats?
• What is your business model? I can see my music files being uploaded to Amazon AWS, and the cost of storing large amount of lossless/hires audio files on the cloud and streaming them on demand is by no means low. How do you afford the cost while being non-profit?

 

Hi, my mysterious guest! Sorry for my late reply. Your questions are quite interesting. What’s your initial impression on the Tonal app? How many discs have you collected? Just out of curiosity. Let’s turn back to your original questions:

1. I do want to thank you for contributing to MusicBrainz. The International Classical Music Database is an official supporter of MusicBrainz (listed on https://metabrainz.org/supporters/tiers/8). Community and contributors are very important to any metadata project. We plan to apply CC BY-NC-ND license to our metadata. The metadata is easy to contribute collaboratively and is ready to be published. For now, I wish more people could see the difference of the Tonal metadata engine. I believe it’s so different from other solutions. I wonder if you have enough time and patience to read the introduction to the metadata solution: https://medium.com/tonal-app/tonal-internals-part-2-music-metadata-5ac042c40a8e but I strongly encourage you to read it.
2. I understand your concern about the limitation of the native FLAC codec. For PCM audio, the built-in FLAC codec can handle at least 99% of all the discs ever released (or to be released in the future). Please pardon me if that sounds like sophistry to you. DSD support will introduce some extra dependencies I believe. The philosophy of the Tonal experience is simple, lean, and minimal: formats not supported by the built-in FLAC codec and a separate DSD/DoP codec will not be supported, at least for a long time.
3. You’re such a geek! The AWS serves as a content-addressable cloud storage. All files in AWS are of a special format, without metadata and personal information. Without the Tonal app, these files are basically useless. The keys to access these files are stored in your personal iCloud drive. Tonal offers limited discs slots for freemium users. Premium tiers unlock such limitation. The metadata engine is powered by International Classical Music Database, but Tonal itself is not owned by the non-profit. Tonal need to raise money, grow the team, iterate the product, acquire users, and be profitable.

Thank you again and have a nice day!

[ases]

4 hours ago, baoshan said:

 

Hi, my mysterious guest! Sorry for my late reply. Your questions are quite interesting. What’s your initial impression on the Tonal app? How many discs have you collected? Just out of curiosity. Let’s turn back to your original questions:

1. I do want to thank you for contributing to MusicBrainz. The International Classical Music Database is an official supporter of MusicBrainz (listed on https://metabrainz.org/supporters/tiers/8). Community and contributors are very important to any metadata project. We plan to apply CC BY-NC-ND license to our metadata. The metadata is easy to contribute collaboratively and is ready to be published. For now, I wish more people could see the difference of the Tonal metadata engine. I believe it’s so different from other solutions. I wonder if you have enough time and patience to read the introduction to the metadata solution: https://medium.com/tonal-app/tonal-internals-part-2-music-metadata-5ac042c40a8e but I strongly encourage you to read it.
2. I understand your concern about the limitation of the native FLAC codec. For PCM audio, the built-in FLAC codec can handle at least 99% of all the discs ever released (or to be released in the future). Please pardon me if that sounds like sophistry to you. DSD support will introduce some extra dependencies I believe. The philosophy of the Tonal experience is simple, lean, and minimal: formats not supported by the built-in FLAC codec and a separate DSD/DoP codec will not be supported, at least for a long time.
3. You’re such a geek! The AWS serves as a content-addressable cloud storage. All files in AWS are of a special format, without metadata and personal information. Without the Tonal app, these files are basically useless. The keys to access these files are stored in your personal iCloud drive. Tonal offers limited discs slots for freemium users. Premium tiers unlock such limitation. The metadata engine is powered by International Classical Music Database, but Tonal itself is not owned by the non-profit. Tonal need to raise money, grow the team, iterate the product, acquire users, and be profitable.

Thank you again and have a nice day!

Thanks for the informative reply. The Tonal app, in my opinion, is surprisingly stable and polished despite being the initial version. I have to admit that I do not own much classical music and I tried Tonal out of curiosity, so I imported several non classical albums for testing. It looks like their metadata was updated today?

Regarding the limitations of FLAC, I agree that for handling ripped physical discs FLAC is perfectly fine, but digital purchases of 32bit PCM do exist (http://www.e-onkyo.com/music/album/lacm14706/ for example, 192kHz/32bit is only available as WAV), and I believe they need to be handled. You may consider falling back to ALAC when necessary, since ALAC handles 32bit fine, and is available on both macOS and iOS.

[baoshan]

3 hours ago, ases said:

Thanks for the informative reply. The Tonal app, in my opinion, is surprisingly stable and polished despite being the initial version. I have to admit that I do not own much classical music and I tried Tonal out of curiosity, so I imported several non classical albums for testing. It looks like their metadata was updated today?

Regarding the limitations of FLAC, I agree that for handling ripped physical discs FLAC is perfectly fine, but digital purchases of 32bit PCM do exist (http://www.e-onkyo.com/music/album/lacm14706/ for example, 192kHz/32bit is only available as WAV), and I believe they need to be handled. You may consider falling back to ALAC when necessary, since ALAC handles 32bit fine, and is available on both macOS and iOS.

 

Thank you for the reply.

 

The initial release is not that buggy, but it does have some known bugs to be fixed. Some important features are missing, plus, some interaction design is not fluid enough.

 

If you’ve read the metadata article, you’ll see a language designed for describing music metadata and a lightweight editor. All edits are pushed to affected users in real time. All edits are reflected in a Git repo, which is to be published under a common creative license.

 

Thank you very much for the ALAC suggestion. I personally agree with you.

 

Stay tuned, and I wish the app has the opportunities to bring you a better music experience in the future.