Tonus is alpha — what works, what doesn't, and where to talk about it

[madmax1301]

Hi — thanks for finding the project. This thread exists so you don't have to dig through the README to figure out (1) what Tonus is supposed to do, (2) what's stable, (3) what isn't, and (4) where the right place is to ask things or report things.

What Tonus is

Tonus is the acquisition half of a self-hosted music setup. It searches Spotify, Deezer or YouTube, downloads the audio, tags it, and drops it into your Navidrome library folder. Navidrome itself stays the player — Tonus does not stream, transcode, or expose music to clients. Think of it as the "buy/grab" workflow that sits next to your existing Navidrome instance.

It's built single-tenant (one Tonus install per household / per NAS) but explicitly multi-user: per-user accounts, admin separation, optional 2FA, Personal Access Tokens, brute-force-banned login. Provider credentials and TOTP secrets are encrypted at rest. If you're a solo user with no auth needs, a single-user tool will probably serve you better.

Where Tonus stands today

Honest status, no version numbers because those age fast:

Stable enough to use daily

• Deezer search → YouTube download → Navidrome scan trigger
• Spotify search (with your own Client-Credentials)
• Multi-user auth (JWT + Argon2id), TOTP 2FA, Personal Access Tokens
• Encrypted-at-rest provider credentials and TOTP secrets
• Multi-library support (multiple Navidrome paths labelled in the UI)
• Docker on Linux/NAS (host-mode) and macOS (bridge override)

Working but rough edges

• YouTube bot-detection occasionally requires manual cookie export
• CSV import is fast but the resume logic has surprised people
• The dual-VPN source-IP-splitting is NAS-mode only and silently disables itself if the bind addresses aren't reachable

Not yet there

• Soulseek / slskd integration — open question, see Ideas category
• Subsonic-direct (without Navidrome) — not on the roadmap, but tell me if you want it
• Ansible/Helm/non-Docker deployment — out of scope

Where to put what

You want to …	Use this
Report a reproducible bug	Issues → Bug report
Suggest a concrete feature	Issues → Feature request
Ask "is X possible / should I use Y"	Discussions → Q&A
Share your setup, plugins, dotfiles	Discussions → Show and Tell
Float a half-baked idea	Discussions → Ideas
General chatter	Discussions → General

Issues are for things with a clear desired outcome. Discussions are for everything else.

Three things I'd genuinely like feedback on

If you have time to leave a comment under this thread:

1. What was confusing in your first 30 minutes? I'm probably blind to whatever rough edge cost you the most time.
2. Which provider would you actually use as your primary source? Deezer, Spotify, YouTube — or none of those, and why?
3. If Tonus had Soulseek support, would that change anything for you? Trying to size the demand before I commit time to it.

Thanks for being here this early. The project is three days public as of this post — most of what's good about it will come from people who showed up before it had any reputation to coast on.

— Max

[schoeschi]

Hey! I've just discovered your project and am trying it out currently. I'd love to give you some feedback:

1. What was confusing: I initially was confused as to why there is a delay between downloading songs. After finding out that I can change this, this wasn't a problem to me anymore. Maybe, the (already good) guide on how to get the Spotify API token could be improved by putting the guide in a popup or something.
2. All of them, but, considering most users are switching over: Spotify.
3. No.

Please keep this project going (I love it!), and maybe, add the possibility to download all the albums of an artist.

[madmax1301]

This is exactly the kind of feedback the thread was asking for — you answered all three questions and found a rough edge. Thank you, and sorry for the slow reply.

On each point:

• The delay between downloads confusing you is the most useful thing here. That pause is deliberate — Tonus paces downloads to stay under the anti-bot radar of YouTube/SoundCloud — but if it reads as "is this thing stuck?", that's a UX failure on my side, not on yours. It's configurable (worker cooldown in Settings → Defaults), but the real fix is making the why visible in the moment instead of leaving you to discover it. I'll surface it in the queue UI.
• Spotify token guide as a popup — good, concrete suggestion. The help text is currently an inline expander in onboarding; a proper walkthrough/popup that you can re-open later from Settings is a clear improvement. Noting it.
• "Most users are switching from Spotify" — that's a helpful signal for where to put effort. It also means the Spotify search bug someone else just hit (#55) matters more than I'd weighted it, so that's moving up.
• Soulseek: no — noted as another data point. The more "no"s I get, the more comfortable I am not pulling a whole slskd stack into this.

And the "download all albums of an artist" idea — you already turned it into #56, which is the right home for it. I've replied there with how I'd approach it. Let's keep that part of the conversation on the issue.

Genuinely glad it's useful to you — that's the whole reason it's public this early.