Last week was a pretty hectic one, but we still managed to put together an entry for a competition for tickets to the Picnic 08 conference in Amsterdam. And we won, which means Alex will be in Amsterdam on Thursday and Friday! The result is a pretty amusing video showing a typical week at SoundCloud, also featuring the legendary Speedy J. Enjoy!

From the nice-to-have department: We’ve added full Fluid support to SoundCloud, which means that you now with a few easy clicks can turn SoundCloud into a standalone desktop app on Mac OS X. We’ve added support for Growl so that timed comments show up as notifications complete with user images when you play back a track, you’ll also see a nice Apple Mail-style badge for your unread messages in the dock, and last but not least Katharina made a super-slick desktop icon for it. Nils put together a quick screencast so that you can see it in action:

Hey friends,

today we’re launching two smaller features that at first may go unnoticed but in the long run will hopefully provide an even better experience. First of we’re limiting the amount of people you can follow to 2000. We don’t really like to put limits in place but this one is in to stress the point that SoundCloud is a place where you do more with fewer people – rather then less with a lot of people/friends/contacts. This limit affects very few people directly but may mean that you receive a few less people following you in the future.

Next change is under the DropBox tab where we’ve separated between two kinds of incoming tracks. The first tab will only show tracks that are uploaded specifically for you via your dropbox. These are tracks that are only shared to a single person – you.

The second tab now shows the tracks that have been privately shared to you by people you’re not following. These tracks may also be shared to more people than just you.

Tracks in the dashboard are still always only from the people you are following.

That’s it. As always though, write us to let us know what you think, or drop me a track explaining it:
Send me your track

It’s been another two hardcore work weeks at the SoundCloud HQ and the result is out now in the form of the Carly release, after NYC-based Carly Simon (famous at the office for her 1982 hit ‘Why’).

The big one for this release is the first version of contact lists. Yep, that’s right, the feature many of you have been craving for since months is now alive and kicking on the site. You can now manage your own contact lists of collaboration partners, VIP DJs, journalists, A-list music bloggers, etc and share tracks with them in a click. You’ll find it under the ‘People’ tab. Simply go there, create a list, upload a track using the normal upload process or edit an already uploaded track, select ‘Lists’ under private sharing and select one or more lists you’d like to share to. That’s it, you’ve now shared the track to the whole list!

Also, with this release we’d like to introduce our next screencast where Nils is covering how the DropBox makes receiving music on your label page or music blog really easy. The brilliant SoundCloud moving logo music is from an unreleased track by Carl Borg.