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?