News has been reaching us of some really exciting contests going on in the Cloud at the moment. It’s great to see lots of users being creative with their SoundCloud players and dropboxes. And for budding producers and SoundCloud users it means the chance to win some fantastic prizes!

Get Physical have a fantastic new concept album due out on 6th February called Final Song #01. It might sound a bit morbid but the album is a collection of records that the artists would like to be played at their funeral or hear before they die: the track that is so important to them it should be played for eternity. And they’re letting SoundCloud users join in the fun. Have you produced a song that you’d like to hear before you die? If so, upload it to the Final Song dropbox and if your track is selected you’ll win some great prizes!

Roll Records have really gone all out and are offering the chance to win a 20” iMac by remixing Reead. Who doesn’t want to win a 20” iMac? Make sure you check out this competition that Roll Records is running in association with DJDownload. Closing date for entries to their dropbox is 15th February.

The Dandy Warhols are also making use of SoundCloud for their remix competition. We only just found out about this one so there’s not much time left to enter a remix. But check out all the stems and more information on their SoundCloud page or get them right here:

Compost are offering you the chance to rework ‘Aurevoir’ a track taken from Alif Tree’s second album ‘Clockwork’ available spring 2009. Prizes include a full release of the remix on Compost Records, a free SoundCloud Pro account and a delightfully put together care-package with 50 vinyls or CD’s picked out from the Compost vaults. The deadline for remix submissions is Sunday 15th March, so get over to Compost’s page and get busy!

If you’re using SoundCloud in a really interesting way then we’d love to hear about it.

First, let us give you the good news: SoundCloud is back up on a monster server setup based on a bunch of state-of-the-art Sun servers hosted by London-based hosting experts EveryCity. Also big thanks to Sun Startup Essentials for helping out. Performance is a lot better now.

It’s been a long and sweaty day for all of us at the SoundCloud office, with a totally non-excusable downtime extending over 12 hours. The downtime was mainly caused by the disks of our main database server completely giving up right in the middle of things as we were migrating to the new data center. This essentially killed our old server setup. So there was nothing else to do but to look forward and move on, as fast as humanly possible. The good news is we made it in a day.

But the downtime is of course far from acceptable. For those of you with PRO accounts who experienced problems during the day, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We will compensate you for any inconvenience it might have caused you. Also, we’re taking action and will make sure there’s better failover handling in the setup, and add more monitoring and warning systems in the near future.

Hopefully this should never happen again.

Now we hope you will enjoy the new, faster SoundCloud!

We’re experiencing some unexpected downtime on soundcloud.com since around 8am CET this morning. This has not been planned downtime, and so it’s indeed very unfortunate. The error happened as we were making final preparations for the move to a new and much more powerful datacenter in London. We hope that it will be resolved by 5pm today at the latest. No data has been lost.

Over the past weeks our development team has been working hard on making soundcloud faster. A big part of that project has been preparing for the move to a new datacenter. The team has done a very good job on optimizing the site, but the big speed bottleneck has proven to be in the current server setup.

By 6pm today this should all change and SoundCloud will be back up again, faster than it ever was.

Sincerely,
The SoundCloud Team

Earlier this week 8,000 members of the international music industry descended upon Cannes for the Midem conference and it’s digitally-focused sister event MidemNet. The clouds hung heavy over the conference hall for the first few days. But despite rumours of lower attendances this year the overall vibe was of a positive more forward-thinking music industry that is ready to leverage all the tools and opportunities at its disposal.

For our part, SoundCloud was selected to pitch at the MusicAlly / MidemNet New Business Showcase. The showcase, now in its second year, aims to “highlight the most enterprising, innovative and inspiring business ideas to help to create value and move the music industry forwards in the 21st century”. That might be a bit of a mouthful but we were thrilled to be taking part. And even more excited to be announced as winners after a great pitch on stage by Alex.

Amongst all the buzz we were busy spreading the word face-to-face with a steady stream of labels, publishers, artists, A&R’s and other partners. Expect to see some interesting new users, integrations and activities on the Cloud in the very near future. By night we were busy hustling, drinking and catching up with familiar faces at the many events, meetups and dinners going on in and around Cannes.  A big thanks to Topspin, Warp and Tru Thoughts for providing some of our highlights.

Overall, the one thing that’s clear from talking to everyone is that it’s going to be a very exciting 2009!

It’s been a hard but productive week at the SoundCloud office. Most of our efforts have been spent on updates of our backend infrastructure to keep up with the fast growth of the platform. A few hours ago we did a major upgrade of the site and you should be seeing a significant performance improvement now. It’s still far from perfect but we should be back to response times of late fall. The goal is to get slow pages to render faster than in half a second, and the average page should load much faster than that.

We are also preparing to move to a new datacenter which will bump performance a great deal and allow us to add more computing power and storage capability in a much faster and more flexible way than now.

I’d like to apologize again for the–at times–terrible performance this week. Now we’re already focused on next week and the remaining performance challenges…

Phew! Saturday morning here at the office and we’ve just deployed yet another fix to the site to try and avoid the server problems we’ve been experiencing lately. This week has been quite intense and we’ve clearly been underestimating the interest in the cloud and ultimately got more traffic than we could deal with. We’re, of course, really sorry about the slow loading times and page loading failures.

Since Wednesday we’ve been deploying fixes & updates to the site but even still we haven’t been able to keep up. Yesterday saw the culmination and some pretty bad server performance throughout most of the day. By the evening we’d put out several fixes and things seemed to be working ok (albeit still slow). This morning troubles were back again and now we’ve been working on and deployed a new fix. Currently things are back but performance is still a bit slow unfortunately.

This weekend we’re hoping to be able to get past the point where the site simply doesn’t respond (the 500 page). This coming week should see the site get faster and faster every day and by the end of the week we hope to have the slowness under control. By the end of this month (yes this is all we’re working on this month!) we’re aiming to have the whole site faster than ever and running on a set-up that will avoid problems like this in the future.

Again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope that this mornings fixes will make things a bit better and that we’re soon faster than ever before. The whole team has been, and will keep working hard on this and hopefully soon a lot of the work will start showing on the site performance. Big thanks to everybody helping out and being supportive! Feel free to email me (alex@) or eric (eric@) to let us know what you think.

We’ve spent the last few days working on a few updates and fixes to the cloud. Good news is they are now online. Bad news is that the site still is slow at times, but we are ON that one. Here are the most important updates just released:

• You can now download tracks without being logged in to SoundCloud. We’ve received many requests for this, so it feels great that it’s now possible.
• You can now add new sets from scratch, simply by going to your sets page and click Create A New Set. You can then upload new tracks to the set directly, or add already uploaded ones.
• Type-ahead search for people in the private sharing contacts picker and contact list is much faster, especially if you have many contacts.
• Some important issues with sets sharing were fixed. Clicking individual tracks in the emails being sent out for private sets will now work. Also, deleting sets works in all situations.

This is just for starters. We’re really happy to be back, taking SoundCloud to the next level in ‘09. And again, we wish you all a great year using it as well!

It’s 2009 and the very multi-national SoundCloud team is (almost) back in our Berlin offices. It’s been a beautiful but painful christmas for us watching the SoundCloud servers fighting to serve requests to our rapidly growing user base. Now that we’re back in the office our top priority is to bring snappy back. The goal is to have a super-fast SoundCloud by the end of January. But you will see the first results of our efforts already this week.

We are deeply sorry for this unfortunate “holiday slowdown”. The only thing we can do to make things right is to FIX IT, FAST.

That said, our holiday discount for PRO accounts is expiring tomorrow, so now is a good time to grab that one-year PRO account (Starting at €59, or roughly $79).

From the SoundCloud team we would like to wish everybody a smashing 2009!