It’s monday and we’re happy to announce that you can now “report” tracks on SoundCloud, so if you for example find a track that smells like spam or a copyright infringement or doesn’t comply in some other way with our community guidelines, you can let us now and we’ll take a look. This feature is also useful for reporting tracks with poor audio quality or other glitches. This is how it looks:

That’s it, hope you like it!

We’re pleased to announce that there’s a new plugin called VisualSound that let’s you embed the SoundCloud widget quick and easy on any self-hosted Wordpress blog. To make the widget appear in your blog, you can write something like this:

Where “rich-jones” is the permalink for the artist on SoundCloud and “rich-jones-storm” is the track permalink. The result is:

The plugin has a number of other options for embedding sets, our DropBox and even the Cloudplayer. It also has a whole configuration panel for setting default color of the widget, and more. Big thanks to Wildchild for creating the plugin!

Update: This plugin is outdated, please check the updated WordPress Shortcode Plugin here and read or recent blogpost about the full WordPress integration.

We just launched a small but heavily requested feature for companies (labels, mastering studios, producers, etc) who bought any of our PRO accounts. You can now view invoices for each transaction in your payment settings. Ready to print for your records.

It’s about time: SoundCloud now has super-smooth Twitter integration. It means that SoundCloud can now automatically post a Tweet when you upload either a new track or set to SoundCloud! Simply go to your settings and connect your Twitter account with SoundCloud (No need to put in your Twitter password, since Twitter now has oAuth support!)…

… click “Allow” …

… and the next time you upload a tune SoundCloud will post this to your Twitter stream. Neat!

It’s great to see all the cool stuff people are building on the SoundCloud API and our widgets. Here’s one project that we’d like to highlight, it’s a mixtape site called QC Mixtapes and they have a feature built on SoundCloud called the Mixcloud. Here you can browse mixes from different genres in a really smooth way. If you’re a DJ and you’re reading this you can easily submit your mix to the site by sending a message to QC Mixtapes on SoundCloud with a link to your mix on SoundCloud.
Here we are browsing the ‘funk’ genre:

Here’s the single page for a mix:

They’ve also built a Facebook app, so you can share mixes you like there.

All in all, great stuff!

We’re really please to be able to announce a complete redesign of SoundCloud today, headed by our mega-interaction designer Katharina. We’ve made a great effort to optimize the site for speed and usability even further, addressing most of the major areas of the site. Below is a list of the big things that have been improved:

Dashboard

The dashboard has been made both leaner and smarter. The new design fits more content into the page and groups items by users in a clever way so that you’ll find the important stuff faster. A convenient “Show more” button in the footer will show you more content without leaving the page.

Player

The player has been torn apart into molecules and put back together again: it’s now snappier, has better contrast and adding timed comments is a lot smoother.

Single track & set pages

The single track pages have gotten a major re-design to make more space for the waveform, yet better displaying relevant metadata.

Search

Search is faster, and gives more relevant results thanks to our new hotness algorithm.

Speed

A lot has happened behind the scenes as well, and you should be seeing radically faster average loading for many pages and actions on SoundCloud now!

So that’s it! The new release is named after Miguel (aka Kid 606) who was in our office a couple of weeks ago when we got interviewed by Groove magazine. Why not go and take it for a spin?

Tomorrow Thursday our two iPhone heroes Gernot and Ullrich will show off the SoundCloud Cocoa API wrapper at CocoaHeads Berlin. If you happen to be in Berlin it’s a great chance to get a deeper look at our API and how you can use it to build iPhone or Cocoa apps with cool audio sharing features.

UPDATE: Slides have been added.

We didn’t decide until right at the last minute but we’re pleased to say that SoundCloud will be in Austin for SXSW this year. Being nominated in the ‘music’ category for the The 12th Annual SXSW Interactive Web Awards helped make up our minds. We have no idea if we’ll win but we’ve been getting several awards recently so it’s probably a good idea to have someone there in case we do!

If you’re going and would like to hook up for a beer or schedule a meeting then please drop Dave a message via SoundCloud. We’ll be straddling both the interactive and music parts of the conference from 13th to 20th March. Hope to see you there.

We’ve seen a lot of sites and projects using the SoundCloud API in the last few weeks, and of course we’re super-excited about this! One thing we’ve noticed is that a few of these projects have used Javascript-based players to play back the audio. Check for example the slick and minimalistic player on electronica label Pluxemburg’s new site, or the player on the innovative crowd-sourced site Listen to Blogs. They both use their own Javascript-based players powered by the SoundCloud API. This is a nice technique (that we’re also using ourselves on soundcloud.com) since it gives you full control over the look’n'feel and also enables tight integration with the rest of the site.

Realising that using Javascript to build music players for your SoundCloud-powered sites is becoming increasingly popular, we decided to share some of our knowledge in this area. So without further ado we’d like to announce the open-source SoundCloud Javascript-based player! It’s a simple, extensible, great-looking player based on SoundManager 2 and jQuery. It takes the shape of a customizable jQuery plugin, that let’s you create a player with one line of javascript, for any link to a SoundCloud-track on your page. Simply put this in your HTML:

<a class="soundcloud-player" href="http://soundcloud.com/forss/flickermood">Play</a>

And put this in your javascript:

$("a.soundcloud-player").scPlayer();

And voilà, you have a player on your page!
Check it out and view live examples here.