As awkward as it may be we’ve decided to put on our self-promotion hats this week. SoundCloud has been nominated for three categories in the Techcrunch Europas Awards that recognise and celebrate this past year’s most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations. You don’t need to register or fill out any silly forms (as is quite often the case with these things!). So if you have a few spare seconds then show us some click-love and vote via the links below

• Best New Startup 2008-9
• Best Startup Founders
• Best Entertainment Application / Service

Thx!

Fellow Berliner Richie Hawtin has always kept himself at the forefront of music technology ever since his rise to the top of the electronic music scene in the 90’s. He’s well known for his early use of laptops and digital mixing equipment, from the development of Midi enabled DJ mixers such as Allen & Heath’s Xone92 & 3D mixers, to Final Scratch DJ technology. More recently he helped launch a Twitter app for Traktor that tweets the details of tracks as he plays them in his live sets.

So it’s a sign of the times that he’s now using the SoundCloud DropBox to receive DJ promos for himself and artist demos for his label Minus.

Thanks to some changes to the way existing users can drop tracks to each other it’s now simpler than ever to do. There’s no need to upload again to someone’s DropBox, the sender can simply select one of their existing tracks.

So, if you’re a DJ, label or journalist, make things easy for yourself and the people sending you tracks… start using your DropBox today.

We’re all going crazy today at the SoundCloud office clicking around our new release–it’s mad slick! So slick in fact that we decided to name it Kim after Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who by the way used SoundCloud heavily for the release of their new album… There are a few major upgrades in this release that we’d love to tell you about.

Where’s my DropBox?

There has been some confusion previously on what the difference was between dropping a track in someone’s “DropBox” and sharing the track to someone privately. So you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve simplified this by effectively making “dropping” and “sharing” the same thing. Using the DropBox to “drop” a track to somebody will now simply share it to that person.

This change has also allowed us to simplify the way you receive tracks too. The most radical difference is that there is actually no DropBox tab anymore. But don’t worry, it’s better now because you’ll get everything in your dashboard instead. Plus you’ll also get two clean lists of incoming tracks: one from people you are following, and one from others (people you are not following). This makes it easier to stay up to date with what tracks have been shared to you-regardless of whether they came through your DropBox or not!

Smarter DropBox

We’ve added one of our most requested features: you can now drop already uploaded tracks into anybody’s DropBox. And you can even drop public tracks. Dropping a public track will notify the recipient in their dashboard and over email just like for private sharing (naturally these notifications can be turned off as well).

Better navigation

We’ve redesigned the site header with smart dropdown menus that make it easy to find all key areas of the site in one click.

Groups

Groups are an entirely new feature on SoundCloud. They can be started by anybody and are a great way to bring people together around a specific theme or project. Want to start a remix contest? Make a group for it and let people send their remixes to that group. You’ll get a DropBox badge for the group that you can put on any page. And you’ll get a great player widget that will show all tracks that have been posted to the group. Groups can also be moderated to give you full control over its contents if required. More info and ideas on groups will follow soon in a blog post dedicated to this great new feature.

So that’s it for perhaps the biggest upgrade ever since the birth of the Cloud. Now go play!

Fancy filling your studio with the latest Afrobeat sounds? Well why not take part in the Tony Allen Remix Project.

Nigerian drummer and songwriter Tony Allen is one of the great rhythmic originators of dance music – his work with Fela Kuti in the 1970s inspired the likes of Brian Eno and many other electronic and disco pioneers. And he remains at the cutting edge, working with electronic producers like Funky Lowlives and Dr L in the 90s, with Sebastian Tellier on the classic ‘La Ritournelle’, and now with Damon Albarn in The Good The Bad & The Queen.

Now, to celebrate the release of Tony Allen’s new album Secret Agent, World Circuit Records are very excited to announce the Tony Allen remix project in which they’re offering the opportunity to remix the title track from the album – ‘Secret Agent’ – a majestic slice of hardcore roots Afrobeat featuring a driving groove, penetrating guitar, pulsating horn riffs and stirring vocals.

The winner will win a SoundCloud Pro Max account for one year, as well as either a day’s studio time at Livingston Studios in London or the Reason Premium edition PLUS the Recycle software, should you not live in the UK. Deadline is July 7th. Get involved and more info by visiting the Tony Allen Remix Project site.

Enjoy!

At the end of this week parts of our team will be at the Sónar festival in Barcelona to spread the word about the cloud. This year we will have a stand at the Professional Fair and talk to artists, djs, labels and all other people interested in working with music on the web.

If you’re already using SoundCloud we’d love to show you some of the new features that are coming up as well as a few tricks on how to use the service in the best way possible. And for those of you that are interested in going PRO there will be a special Sónar discount (including t-shirts and stickers!) available at the stand.

So, drop by and say hello, we will be there from Thursday until Saturday and will be located at the second floor in the main building, just look for a huge orange cloud!

Type Records is not your typical record label. They’re a label that inspires through experimentation. And not just with their music, which comes from a line up of artists ranging from Peter Broderick to The Alps and Machinefabriek.

So when we heard that they were redesigning their website we were really hoping that they’d be able to use SoundCloud to serve up some of their music. We weren’t disappointed. Their newly-launched site is clean, simple and has rather elegantly made use of SoundCloud to allow fans to stream their entire catalogue online (with the exception of some limited 7″ releases). As an extra nice touch there are buy links in each player that take you straight through to Boomkat, for a range of purchasing options.

To quote Fact Magazine, “this is the sort of shit that drives us wild!”

Johannes Wagener, our new super-skilled backend developer has just created a fully functional ruby gem for SoundCloud. So if you’re building any kind of Ruby-based application it just got a whole lot easier to add an integration with SoundCloud. With a few lines of code you can do stuff like:

• Add an Export-to-SoundCloud feature to move audio from your application to SoundCloud. This can be added for any web- or desktop based app, like e.g. on FiRe. This feature is great for, say, audio editors or music creation software–web or desktop-based.
• Move audio tracks along with their metadata–including private tracks and sets–from SoundCloud to your application, like e.g. Digital-Tunes is already doing. This is great if you are, say, a download shop and want to add the ability for labels and artists to upload directly to you.
• Log in to your application using SoundCloud (using our oAuth-based authentication), like on SoundCloud Upload Front. Leverage the almost 150 000 strong community of artists and labels using SoundCloud for your own application.
• And much, much more…

There is a cool open-source demo application showing off the SoundCloud Ruby Gem called SoundCloud Upload Front that is hosted for free on Heroku. It let’s you login using your SoundCloud account and upload tracks to SoundCloud from any public URL on the web.

We’re really excited to see what you will build with this! And please do let us know if you have questions, api@soundcloud.com.