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!