We are excited to unveil the new ToneHunt website. We’ve been quietly working on a lot of changes and this is the result of hard work and dedication to making this platform the best place to find tones and get inspired. This is a complete rebuild of the platform, one that was needed to make sure its continued development, growth and expansion.
It’s incredible to think that all this started 1 year ago as a community effort from the NAM Facebook page. So, thank you to all of you that contributed in any way to the beginnings of this platform. But most of all, thank you to the whole community that continues to support us on a daily basis. So, to celebrate this 1 year mark, we decided to embark on a new journey by releasing our new website.
What’s new?
For this new release, we took all the things that we loved and worked pretty well from the previous website, but we added a lot of new features based on feedback, requests and experience. Some of these features are:
New Home page
New Blog area
New site navigation
Refreshed look n feel
New Models page with Grid and List View
New Filtering system with tags
Improved Search system
New upload/edit model page
Newsletter
Refreshed Model page
Refreshed User page
Ability to share to different social media
Donations page
Privacy Policy
Terms and Conditions
Licensing information
Support page
All-around improvements
Github Repo and source code
One major decision that we made moving forward is that we are no longer open source. However, TONEHUNT IS AND WILL REMAIN FREE TO USE (so don’t worry!). There’s a couple of reasons for this decision:
First of all, throughout our first year, the amount of contributions to the platform’s code was very minimal. We do recognize that some contributions were made and they were very important at that time. And for that, we are very grateful to those that helped and contributed to the source code. Thank you.
Second, we feel that the majority of the community care about ToneHunt as a platform itself rather than what technology it’s been used and/or how things work behind the scenes. And that’s okay. We want to make sure that ToneHunt continues to exist so the community can discover the best tones out there and get inspired. That’s our goal.
Finally, we are now using new technologies and services, which requires certain stuff to not be public for security and performance reasons. This gives us the tools and abilities to work faster and build new features quickly. Maintaining an open source project requires a lot of time and effort. And we would rather spend that time and effort making new features and improvements with the resources that we have.
Of course, anyone interested in contributing to the platform is more than welcome. Please reach out to us on our Discord and we’ll get in touch.
The source code for our previous website will remain open source and available in our Github. However, we are no longer maintaining and updating that project.
Support ToneHunt. We need you.
Running and maintaining a platform is not easy. It requires resources, support, time and effort. And all these translate to costs. Things like servers, hosting, cloud services, development, support and many other things. During our first year, we've been covering all those costs internally. But things are evolving and growing and, naturally, so are the costs.We do want to maintain ToneHunt free to use for everyone. But that requires looking for alternatives to fund the platform so it can continue to operate and evolve. We have many ideas and plans (some of them are already in motion) but most of them will take place during the year. We feel that donations are a quick and easy solution to start with. Just recently, we created a BuyMeACoffee account for those of you who wish to support us. We already started to receive some donations and we are very grateful for it. So, please support us by donating at https://buymeacoffee.com/tonehunt and/or by sharing the link (there’s also links on the website). This is an awesome way to contribute to this platform and its community. So thank you in advance!
What’s next?
Well, a lot! We are already working on new features and improvements. We also have a few surprises and collaborations coming up that you’ll definitely love. We’ll be sharing more information on our blog and social media, so make sure to follow us.
We hope you enjoy this new release. If you have questions, comments, feedback or need support, please visit our support page for ways to reach out to us.
Once again, thank you so much for your support and let's continue making this place awesome!
