Help & frequently asked questions

A place to gather everything you watch, read, listen to, play, and visit—on one page, in your own arrangement. From what you love, tonal finds what’s next by how it feels, across every genre and every medium. Follow people too, if you like.

No. Anyone can create an account. Members still get invites to hand out, but they're a way to bring a friend—not a gate.

Three doors, all on the sign-in page: continue with Google, an email and password, or an emailed sign-in link if you'd rather not have a password at all.

Today, all of tonal is free to use, and there are no ads—we don't sell your data or take money to put things in front of you. tonal is member supported. If you'd like to help keep it that way, here's how to become a patron—anything helps.

A small badge beside your username, wherever it appears, a first look at new features, and requests to hey@tonal.cc that get read first. Give monthly or once; a monthly patron can change or cancel anytime from Settings, and nothing about what's free changes either way.

Not yet, but you can add tonal to your home screen and it will sit there like one, with its own icon, one tap from your library.

On an iPhone or iPad, open tonal in Safari, tap the share icon, and choose Add to Home Screen. On an Android phone, open tonal in Chrome, tap the three-dot menu, and choose Add to Home screen—Samsung Internet keeps it under Add page to, Firefox under Install.

On a Mac you can do the same: in Safari, choose File → Add to Dock.

Tap the search circle in the bottom-right corner of any page and type a title. Pick a result to open it, then use the shelf button at the bottom of that window to choose where it goes—Watched, Reading, Want to go. It lands on that shelf straight away.

Tap any cover to open it. Along the bottom of that window are your stars and a heart on the left, and the shelf button on the right; the pencil beside the stars opens a note. Half stars work, and a heart is its own thing—the shorthand for something that really landed.

Open the account menu (your avatar, in the bottom-right corner) and choose Edit. You can then drag whole shelves into the order you want, and drag covers around within a shelf. Done, at the bottom of the screen, exits. Each shelf also keeps its own sort—tap the shelf's title (it reads something like "Films — Watched — Recent") to change it.

Cover art is looked up from public catalogs. When nothing matches confidently you get a plain lettered tile rather than a picture of the wrong thing—a blank is better than a mistake.

If a cover is wrong, send the title to hey@tonal.cc and we'll fix the match.

Search covers the big public catalogs for each medium, but they have gaps—small-press books, indie games, and new releases are the usual misses. Send the title to hey@tonal.cc and we'll look at why.

Letterboxd, Goodreads, Last.fm, Spotify, Steam, and podcasts you watch on YouTube. Open the account menu (your avatar, in the bottom-right corner) and choose Connect, then pick a service and follow the steps on its card.

Letterboxd and Last.fm re-sync every hour without you doing anything. The others are point-in-time imports—run them again whenever you want to catch up.

No. Items are matched by what they are, not by where they came from, so re-importing the same library is a no-op—and the same album arriving from two different services stays one item.

Never. A sync only fills in what's missing. Anything you wrote or rated yourself is left exactly as you left it.

Your items stay. Disconnect from the service's card under Connect; it stops future syncing and takes nothing off your shelves.

Go to their page—tonal.cc/theirusername—and tap Follow, beside their name at the top. Their adds and ratings then show up under Activity in the account menu (your avatar, in the bottom-right corner), and they appear on your People shelf. You can also find people through search.

Each shelf header has a small link icon at its right end—one tap copies that shelf's address. Tapping the shelf's title instead opens its menu, where Share this shelf builds an image card you can post. For a single thing, open it and use the link icon at the top right of the window.

A weekly note of what the people you follow have been into, and a short email when someone new follows you (never more than one a day). One switch in Settings turns both off, and every one has an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

They’re on one page. Privacy covers what we store, what we don’t, and who else is involved. Terms of use are further down the same page. Both are linked at the bottom of every page, too.

By default, anyone with the link—a tonal profile is meant to be shared. To change that, open the account menu (your avatar, in the bottom-right corner), choose Settings, and turn on Make your library private under Privacy.

Everything. It's enforced by the database, not just hidden in the interface—a private profile drops out of other people's feeds, search, and follower lists, and its ratings and reviews disappear from every detail page, even for people who already follow you.

Both live under Data in Settings (the account menu (your avatar, in the bottom-right corner) → Settings): Export your data, Delete my data, and Delete my account. Privacy & terms spells out exactly what we keep and what happens when you delete it.

No. An import is tallied on your device and the raw file is discarded—only what ends up on a shelf is saved.

Links are good for 24 hours. Go to the sign-in page, enter your email, and choose "Email me a sign-in link" for a fresh one. Your account and everything on it is still there.

Check spam first. If it's not there, ask for a sign-in link from the sign-in page—that works whether or not you ever set a password.

Email hey@tonal.cc. If something isn’t working, say what you were doing and what you saw—a screenshot helps.

Help & FAQ in the account menu (your avatar, in the bottom-right corner) brings you back to this page.