It’s time to expand the reach of your awesome tracks on SoundCloud even further. Our newest baby is called SoundCloud Player.

We know that a lot of artists has a profile (and even a page) on Facebook these days and we thought it could be nice to hot them up a bit with our player. So me & Eric spent two weekends hacking together a SoundCloud application. The app let’s you choose a track or a set from SoundCloud and display it on your profile or page, complete with timed comments, artwork, a crisp waveform display and all!

If you haven’t added it yet, do it here!

It’s built on top of the SoundCloud API which was easy to understand and makes developing applications like this really simple.

And, if you are interested in how to build your own applications using our API, start here. Checking how I did might be helpful, here is my code for download.

Boom. It’s just about that time again: New release! Who’s in for the tribute this time? Well, as we’ve been keeping real busy with some grandiose plans for new big features we’ve had no choice but to keep blasting huge music here at the SoundCloud head quarters. And who makes big enough sounds to use a track titles like Chariots of Fire, Conquest of Paradise, Tales of the Future? Mr Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou aka Vangelis of course. As we all know, there’s big, there’s bigger and then there’s Vangelis. So, Evangelos, this one goes out to you!

So, what have we been up to apart from planning big new things? Actually, quite a bit! For one, you’ll probably notice that the overall performance is a lot better (faster commenting in particular and overall speed of the interface in general). Also, thanks to a lot of new users out we’ve been able to really push our uploader to the max by asking it to process all kinds of strange audio formats. After a few hick-ups we now have the most solid uploader ever, ready to feed on just about any audio format you’d like to serve it.

Thanks for all the great response on the widgets! It sounded like you guys really liked them so we hacked together a Facebook app too. So, now you can basically put your soundcloud tracks just about anywhere on the web.

The forums and feedback messages have been totally on fire (thanks! keep em coming!) and we realized that we needed to improve our systems a bit to be able to respond as fast as we want to. Instead of building a lot of stuff around this we’ve taken the help of our friends over at the great site Get Satisfaction. So, from today we’re trying out running all of the feature request and help forums on Get Satisfaction’s great system. Check it out, drop us a line, and, as always, keep the excellent tunes coming.

Oh, and finally, a few words from the man of the hour.

It’s been a great last few weeks at SoundCloud, a ton of fun stuff going on in and around the cloud! A bunch of great musicians, bloggers, and labels have begun using our cloud tools on a day-to-day basis, and they seem to really dig it. And we’ve been working our asses off lately perfecting some hot new features that we’re proud to roll out today. The name of this release is Tanith, after the living Berlin techno legend who recently made an appearance in the brilliant documentary “We call it techno!” and… drumroll… on SoundCloud with a super-dark dubstep mover that we’ve heard over and over with terrified pleasure in the office lately.

Ok, now to the point! Without further ado we’d love to present the new SoundCloud player:

Yes, what you see is not a test–it’s the brand new sets widget player in action. Use it to put your music anywhere on the web with a simple cut-and-paste maneuver, from MySpace to blogs to your very own site. We’re also using some black magic behind the curtains to find out where players are embedded on the web, and soon you’ll be able to see details about this in the stats graphs for your tracks.

Also, we’ve got some news for all the people using our DropBox solution. You can now see with a glance on your dashboard if new stuff has been dropped in your DropBox since you last checked it.

And, oh yes, we now support more or less all formats in the known audio world. So, if you’re so inclined, please do share your audiophile 192Khz 32 bit little-endian PCM Stereo WAV files with your friends…

Dear Clouders!

Since I’ve started my Quarion project, I’ve been traveling quite a lot but I never thought I would have gone so far down south: these last 3 weeks, I’ve visited 3 Australian metropoles and moved to a few spots in New Zealand…

So how come I could play down there?

Well, it all started when Australian Label Future Classic asked me to do a remix for Jamie Lloyd, one of their key artists. The track came out in December 07 and somehow found its way in the cases (and harddrives) of Anja Schneider, Jennifer Cardini, Steve Bug and countless others. I heard that even Richie Hawtin was playing my remix at the WMC this year! The track became a bit of an underground hit and seemed to have a good following in Australia, so when the label came up with the idea of organizing a tour “down under” that would showcase the Berlin electronic scene, I was lucky to take part of it!

Here was the plan: 3 gigs in Australia (Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney) with Jürgen from Jazzanova and Heiko Laux (Kanzleramt) organized by Future Classic and sponsored by Beck’s (how much more “Berlin” could you get?). In the meantime, I managed to find another in Auckland, New Zealand, so I was set for more than 2 weeks on the other side of the globe…

My ride to Sydney was a long one: leaving Berlin monday at 7 Am and arriving the next day in Sydney at 7 PM. Ouch. I basically spend the first day getting over the jetlag and chilling around Sydney with Jürgen and his lovely wife Fedime.

On thursday, we flew to Brisbane for our first gig at Bar Soma. Heiko Laux arrived straight from New Zealand and we were all motivated to play! The show was good, but there wasn’t a lot of people unfortunately. We had a blast anyway and keeping up with the german tradition of afterhours, Jürgen and Heiko went to another spot after the gig. But it was a different kind of “club”, more like the only bar in Brisbane showing the EM matches live (around 3-4 AM local time). Jürgen is a total Football fan and had to watch every match, even if it means staying awake until 7 AM…Now,I like football but I prefer to sleep, even more when our flight the next day to Melbourne is at 1 PM!

Melbourne was not looking too nice (it was gray and rainy) but I somehow got really attracted to the city. It has a really nice vibe, kind of like NYC. The show at Miss Libertine was really good, the place was packed! Jürgen set the floor on fire with his blend of disco/soul classics and fresh licks from the Sonar Kollektiv camp. Heiko also rocked the spot and we were just all having a great time. I also met up with Christian Vance, a talented producer and all-round nice bloke for whom I just finished a remix, not knowing that he was from Australia! It’s really all about coincidences…

There was a lot of talk about going to a “real” afterhours spot after our show, but a tight schedule and failing Taxi service prevented us to make it there…which was probably a good thing!

We were back the next day to Sydney for our last show, at the Civic Hotel, a superb spot (with an amazing sound system) in the center of the city. The place was packed to the fullest when Jürgen started and people were complaining that they couldn’t enter the venue! It was really like a sauna down there…I had a great time playing my live set and Heiko delivered an awesome Techno/House selection. We definitely finished the tour on a high note!

I had a massive chillout on sunday, basically having a good time with Chad and Nathan from Future Classic. I woke up early the next day to visit some tourist attractions around Sydney: the Manley Island (a bit boring, except for the Aquarium and its sharks) and the Sydney Zoo (awesome!).

I was off to New Zealand the next day and arrived in Auckland around 4 PM. Matt Chicoine (aka top notch Techno/Broken Funk producer Recloose) was kind enough to let me stay at his crib for a few days and I had a great time with him. We went around the city the next day, met up with peeps and checked out some record shops. I instantly had the feeling that the music scene in New Zealand was extremely lively, with many bands, DJ’s or producers taking part in it.

On Thursday, I took a plane to Wellington, which is the most southern city on the North Island. The town is smaller but had an awesome vibe: lots of cafés, bars and clubs, almost all following each other. I also took the time to visit the “Karori Wildlife Sanctuary”, a breathtaking reserve a few minutes away from the city. It’s made to contain only rare species of birds (like the Kiwi) and plants, so they actually built this huge fence around the territory to prevent predators (cats, possums, etc…) to enter and kill the endangered wildlife… An interesting experiment and beautiful location.

I took the ferry the next day, arriving in Picton (the first city on the South Island) and spending the whole afternoon biking around the harbor and the hills…it was just wonderful! I went back to Wellington in the evening and met up with Martin, a sound editor who worked on Lord Of The Rings (in New Zealand, you’re bound to meet Kiwis who worked on the trilogy!) and he showed some nice spots around town.

I returned to Auckland for my gig on saturday with the “Tranzsenic” train, specially made for everyone to marvel at New Zealand’s incredible landscapes. I did just that for 12 hours, staring wide-eyed at my window, as we traveled from sea views to hills, from snowy mountains back to the sea…

The gig at Khuja went really great and I had a good time spinning some more disco records. I also met some really nice people who solidified my idea about the vivacity of the New Zealand scene…

The next days went by really fast and after a quick visit to the Auckland Museum (which has an awesome section dedicated to Maori history and art) and a DJ set at Recloose’s radio show it was time for me to get back to Sydney then catch my long Flight back to Berlin.

All and all, it was an incredible experience for me to get all the way down there and meeting all these nice people who support my music. Many thanks to the Future Classic crew for bringing me to the other side of the world!

The day before i moved down to Berlin and joined this awesome team I was in Stockholm and at Nytorget to have lunch. And I was certainly surprised when I spotted a child running around wearing a t-shirt that featured the logo of our little music pro service, SoundCloud. Sneaking around taking pictures of people’s children might not be one of the things I want to be associated with so the picture is quite bad. However, I think you can tell that It is indeed a fan-t-shirt.

The question still remains though, what is the little guys nick in the cloud? My guess is that It’s at least one of these three, what do you think?

• http://soundcloud.com/kidchocolat
• http://soundcloud.com/deepchild
• http://soundcloud.com/soulchild

Anyway, we get the point, t-shirts will soon be available.

Update: Latest rumors say that it’s The Subliminal Kid, but I can’t seem to spot the beard?

We are at the moment visiting the excellent electronic dance music festival Sónar in Barcelona. I’m writing this from the pro area where we today and yesterday have been meeting some of the most important people of the scene. But it’s nothing like “all work and no play”, the Beatport party at a hotel rooftop yesterday was one of the best ever and both Radio Slave and Sebo K was totally rockin’ it. If you’re in Barcelona, a music pro, and reading this, do give us a call. In the meantime, we will be in the clouds.

Update: The first ones to name at least two of the SoundClouder’s that are in the picture will win a pack of our new kick-ass stickers.

It’s been a while! Summer has arrived in Berlin, and the football-madness too… Our superstar DJ and good colleague, Yanneck (a.k.a. Quarion), is in a plane right now to Australia where he’ll be touring for two weeks… too bad he missed our little rooftop release barbecue last night with fashion label WoodWood. He’ll be greeting the clubkids (and the Kangaroos) from us instead.

Boy, was it worth celebrating good things last night! We just deployed our Rupert release, named after drum’n'bass hero Rupert Parkes, a.k.a. Photek (Forss, btw, is his greatest fan). And we’ve got a few serious upgrades to the cloud:

• You can now embed public tracks on any site, blog or MySpace-profile! Just click the ‘Share’-button, copy the embed-code, and put our kick-ass player wherever you like. You can even change the color to match your page designs and make sure the player is all pimped up to your own style.
• All users on SoundCloud now have DropBoxes, which means you can let anybody send you a track in the slickest way imaginable. Just put a dropbox link or embed-badge on your site/myspace and you’re ready to receive music without going fu*cking insane. The DropBox is really useful if you’re an A&R, label or music blogger and receiving lots of tracks. Sonar Kollektiv and a bunch of other labels are already using it (check Sonar Kollektiv’s contact page) to receive their new tracks. “Dropped” tracks will end up in the DropBox section of your dashboard, and they will appear in your digest mails. We’ve kept them separate from your other stuff so they stay out of the way until you’re ready to check them. The DropBox makes it super easy to receive larger amounts of new tracks and scan through them really fast without having to download everything first.
• We’ve changed the names “your contacts” to “people you follow” and “your fans” to “people who are following you”. Things still work the same as before but it puts emphasis on the fact that at SoundCloud you can add/follow people without them having to add/follow you back (and vice versa have people following/adding you without you having to receive their updates). It’s a bit different but should make more sense then the whole friend/contact social network thingie we hope.

That’s it! This week us SoundClouders will be travelling, stopping by Barcelona the Sonar Festival and London for London Calling so let us know if you feel like hooking up.

Stay cool in the summer heat, or stay hot in the australian winter cool.

How’s it going Cloudettes and Clouders?

We’ve been working on a few background things these last few days, so unfortunately we don’t have any spectacular new functions to present you. But hold tight to your mice, trackpads, trackballs and other interactive devices as we’re preparing a major release in 2 weeks!

While you’re waiting for the next SoundCloud bonanza we’d like to present you a new installment of our popular “Interview Time” series. This month, super-skilled programmer Hannes Tydén switches off his browser tabs for a few minutes and tells us a bit more about the real life up in the Cloud:

• Välkommen Hannes! Glad you could find the time between your intense coding sessions to introduce yourself! Could you tell us how you fell in love with computers and how you ended up moving to Berlin to work on SoundCloud?

I’ve been interested in technology as long as I can remember, and played my fair share of video and computer games since the age of seven. I remember trying to program my Commodore 64, without any success. But the interest in programming started growing in high school. I studied natural science and got a programmable calculator. I programmed it to solve all the physics and chemistry formulas, so I didn’t have to keep them in my head. Of course this made me learn the formulas by heart, but it was fun trying to beat the system.

A year later my mother bought a computer and I started playing around with Photoshop. Another year passed and we got an Internet connection, then I started coding my own personal websites, mostly about the bands I listened to back then. After a while I noticed that I was more interested in designing and coding the websites than in the actual content. It was more fun to build the tree house than to sit in it.

After graduating from high school, Eric, whom I got to know during high school, gave me a tip about an open position at SyncMediaCom, a small web agency in Stockholm, so I applied for a the job and got it. By then I was interested in industrial and graphic design and I started out doing some design work and front end development, but as the company grew I found myself doing less design and more development. This was when I realized that I’d rather work as a programmer than as a designer.

I knew I wanted to get a degree, and in 2002 I started studying computer science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. After a trip to Berlin in 2005 I decided to move here and in September 2006 I began to study at Technische Universität Berlin as an exchange student.

During the spring of 2007 Eric contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write my master thesis for SoundCloud and now, one year later, it’s still not finished…

• Haha, so Eric tricked you into working for SoundCloud without really mentioning it. But I guess there must have been something about the platform that appealed to you?

At first I thought I would just write my thesis for SoundCloud, but as time passed I understood that there was so much more to do and also that SoundCloud really can make an impact on how musicians work, collaborate and promote their creations. This was the first time I felt that what I did actually could make a difference to other people.

Another great thing with SoundCloud is the focus on quality and functionality, in both the big and small. There is room for being creative and at the same time the technological level is higher than I’ve ever experienced. The best of two worlds.

• Well, it’s great to have you on board! Could you explain what your coding colleagues and yourself are working on at the moment?

SoundCloud as a platform gives all the smart people the chance to build what we haven’t thought of yet. At the moment we’re developing players for MySpace, Facebook and blogs so people can share their music to the public more easily. Other stuff you could build with our API (Application Programming Interface) are desktop players, applications for uploading files and also integrating comments into instant messengers like MSN and iChat.

But I think the important aspect of this is that it’s not us at SoundCloud who decides how you want to listen or react to the music in the Cloud, but anyone who feels there is some feature we overlooked while building the site.

The possibilities are endless…

• Sounds really exciting… speaking of which, what sort of music do you like? Who are your favourite artists?

It’s a wide span. At the moment it’s mostly thrash, sludge, progressive metal and hard rock mixed with minimal techno and electronica, then add a dash of pop classics. Might sound like a weird mix, but I really think they blend well.

• That’s interesting because, currently, most of the artists on SoundCloud are House & Techno producers. Do you think SoundCloud could appeal to rock & metal musicians?

Yes, of course. I believe the way they create their music is different, but after the music has been created and recorded it’s more or less the same thing. I know of people who live in one city, go to a studio in another city to record their songs and then the mastering is done by the guy at the studio. Uploading the songs to SoundCloud makes it easier for people to work this way, having a much tighter feedback loop.

• I totally agree. Did you have the chance to discover some interesting new artists via SoundCloud?

Mesak and Snax who both did excellent performances at the SoundCloud party a month ago, even if they’re completely different acts.

The last week I’ve been listening a lot to Demir’s Vorwein set and Superd who gives me some Heimweh for Stockholm.

Dear peeps…

We’re still a bit high off the crazy SoundCloud party we had 2 weeks ago… What a day: 25 artists (thanks again!), 14 hours, 800 Beers, 2 visits by the Police and of course a great mix of people!
Somehow, we all feel that a party as mad as this one (where everyone had fun without any problems) could only have happened in Berlin. Therefore we’d like to dedicate this new release to one of the city’s main cultural icon: Ellen Allien.

Photo by Michael Mann

While the queen of Techno has just released her fourth album, the SoundCloud HQ has been busy working on its most symbolic improvement: moving the platform from private beta version into slightly less private beta ;). So sure, we have a lot of things to do (not to mention turning our office back into a suitable working space after the party) but we still managed to add a bunch of really nice improvements for “Ellen”. And it goes a ‘lil sumthin’ like this:

• Uploading of artwork for each track (artwork for sets coming soon!)
• ID3-tags implementation for 128 kbps version of songs: people downloading your song will see all its info (bpm/artwork/artist/label/genre).
• User names can now contain spaces, capital letters and all types of characters (So listen up Fabio, you can now be “Fabio Genito” instead of “fabiogenito”).
• No more “spam” tracks: people who aren’t in your contact list will not be able to send you “private tracks”. Instead the songs will appear in a new section of the dashboard named “Dropbox”. This helps you to differentiate between the tracks from your contacts and those from strangers.
• Faster uploading of music, and it’s now also quicker to share music to all your contacts via the “select all” button.
• Better “timed comment” design and improved GUI in the “sharing” section.
• And also, be sure to check out our new SoundCloud Tour

So check out these new features and get ready for the next one!

It all started at the end of 2007, probably after another mad night out in Berlin: what if we would be able to turn the SoundCloud office into a club?
The idea was nurtured for a few months, some research was made (where to get the drinks? How late could we do before the police comes?), but we felt we needed an “excuse” to throw a party and turn our office upside down…

Then it all dawned upon us a month ago: SoundCloud will soon be open to the public (at least you’ll be able to listen to tracks that are public if you’re not a member) so why not organize a party to celebrate that? Since the weather was getting warm, we thought it was a killer idea to have the party on the Terrace of the office with a back-to-back showcase session of sorts.

So we began working on the event, making the craziest line-up on the planet (25 acts in 14 hours!), booking flights for artists outside of Germany, finding accommodations, getting drinks and food…basically learning in a few days how to organize a one-day festival on a terrace in Berlin Mitte.

It was hard work (we got no more love for the suckers at Robben & Wientjes by the way) but on sunday the 11th of may at 14.00, we finally managed to open our office doors (actually took them off the hinges) to let people in and start enjoying our first SoundCloud party!

From the rooftop (Photo by Tim)

I was still busy checking out the Soundsystem so I didn’t have time to Dj as Quarion, but everything was ready for Der Klaus to hit the Wheels Of Steel (via Traktor) with his impeccable Deep House selection. 30 mins later and Andre Lodemann was on, dropping House gem after House gem as the sun was blazing and the Terrace was filling up…

Der Klaus (Photo by Alex)

It was already 16.00 when Top Berlin promoter Daniel Best introduced avant-garde Techno act Cloud who blessed us with a world premiere airing of his next release. As people started getting their drinks and chilling on the roof, it was time for vinyl addict Hauke Freer to play a great House set, followed half an hour later by Michelle Owen who spinned a top notch selection of minimal groovy house.

Snax rocking the crowd (Photo by Alex’s unknown friend)

The roof is on fire (Video by Klaus)

The terrace and roof were getting more and more crowded when Snax hit the stage at 17.30. As the first live act of the day, he totally turned the place out with his amazing performance and people were definitely on a party mode when Exit Ghost started playing a tasteful selection of disco and house.
But then our worst fear suddenly materialized as people from the “Polizei” made their appearance: they stopped the music and threatened to shut down the party!

Police in da house (Photo by Joachim)

But as it turned out the Police was mostly concerned about the people hanging out on the roof, so they agreed to let us continue partying as long as we moved the sound system inside our office and restrained our friends to climb up on the roof…phew!

Unfortunately, it took us some time to move all the equipment inside and the music schedule was getting seriously delayed as DJ Humus stepped behind the decks and blessed us with a proper House selection. It also took a while for people to move on the dancefloor because the weather was just too good to be inside…

But the place was slowly getting packed as the sun was setting down and Dirk Rumpff was playing awesome music. Hunee definitely had the dancefloor grooving to his intense disco set when Eric introduced Cornelia and her lovely Electro hip-Hop Popsongs. Her show captivated the audience and most of the people were now in the office, grooving to the beat, having fun, eating sandwiches and drinking warm beer (the fridge was opened too often to cool the drinks down).

Cornelia sparkles (Photo by Alex)

Trickski stepped up 30 minutes later to play a fresh and bouncy House set, quickly followed by a top notch minimal house selection by Noema. It was then time for Jack Migger to perform his rock-oriented material to a mesmerized crowd and the mic was still hot when Little Jinder presented her sweet and sour electropop songs.

Just as the bar was running out of alcoholic drinks (which forced Eric and Alex to make multiple emergency excursions to the nearest 24/7 shop that night), Kalle Kuts exploded the dancefloor with a skillful Boogie, Funk and Disco set. The SoundCloud office was beginning to heat up as the crowd let loose to Le Choix’s punchy Techno live act.

It now seemed as the party would never end and the situation was getting a bit out of hand: more and more people managed to sneak on the roof so we were all hoping that our partycrashers friends at the Polizei would not pay us another visit…

Night people (Photo by Alex)

But the party was going strong nevertheless, thanks to a blinding set by Techno artist Mesak and a soulful mix by jazzy house Maestro Fabio Genito. It was around two in the morning when the Bookhouse Boys dropped a great live performance but sadly, the delay between acts was now so big that
Barbara Hallama and Ben Mono were running late for other duties and had to cancel their performances.
The crowd was also starting to leave as Booty bass heroes Yeah Fool! attacked the decks with their uncompromixing blend of electro, Baile Funk and mash-ups.

Then, just as the SoundCloud DJ team was about to start, the police made a second (and final) appearance, strongly advising us to stop the music if we didn’t want to have our soundsystem confiscated. The party was dying out anyway so we figured we would stop everything now and not get into more trouble…
The last people left our office calmly as we began to close our office down: a lot of cleaning work was waiting for us the next day because our office looked totally trashed out!
But it was all worth it as we all felt we had the party of the year! How to top this? And what a fantastic crowd too! Big thanks to all of you for coming by!

PS. 100:s of more party pictures here.