Archive for August, 2009

DavidDavid Remix Röyksopp’s ‘Tricky Tricky’ Comments

‘Tricky tricky’ remix compEver wanted to take a shot at remixing a track from the amazing Röyksopp (who are, by the way, long-time SoundCloud users)? Well now is your chance.

Yesterday, Röyksopp announced a remix competition for their track Tricky Tricky, saying:

We feel that track “Tricky Tricky” has so much potential, it deserves a life outside the album. Not only is this a chance at beating us at our own game, you also get to mess around with Karin Deijer-Andersson’s (The Knife, Fever Ray) extraordinary vocals! Now, how about that?!?

Yeah! So, what next?

  • Check the original track below and download the raw files
  • Remix Tricky Tricky
  • Submit your remix to your country’s group (Note: the competition is limited to participants living in the following countries: UK, US, Norway, Australia, Germany and France)
  • Spread the word and invite your friends to listen

Tricky Tricky Remix Parts by Royksopp

DavidDavid Updated: Announcing Music Hack Day in Berlin Comments

Mark your calendars and join us for a full weekend of hacking during the first German Music Hack Day on September 18/19/20 at Radialsystem V in Berlin.

In July, a group of more than 200 music techheads gathered at the Guardian offices in London for an overly successful first Music Hack Day. After a long night of coding, about 30 new websites, projects, instruments and software saw the light of the day – we’ve blogged about a bunch of them before: Citysounds.fm, the iPhone Music Visualiser and SoundDrop. Click here for more hacks from that night.

So now it’s time to get everyone together in one of the world’s most important cities for music: Berlin. We want hackers to code and music companies to showcase their API’s and products people can hack on and hopefully at the end of the weekend we’ll see a whole lot of new music awesomeness.

Confirmed partners so far: Ableton, De:Bug, Tape.tv and of course us.

The event is totally free and non-commercial and we would like to keep it this way. We’re still looking for companies interested to sponsor breakfast, lunch or dinner as well as soft drinks and some beer. If you’d like to contribute, please contact us. Any help is greatly appreciated and will ensure that every participant can attend at no charge. Here’s what’s open and what’s already covered:

Registration is free and is limited to 150 participants tops so please register early and let us know how you’d like to contribute. The venue will be open 24 hours and you can stay overnight and hack thru the night.

We’d like to thank the entire teams of all2gethernow, newthinking communications and Music Hack Day for all their help making this possible.

Photo credit: Radialsystem V

DavidDavid New feature: Share user’s latest tracks Comments

We’ve just released a little new feature that we think is pretty nice.

When you look at a user’s profile you’ll see that we added a new ‘Share’ button. This will allow you to share this user’s latest tracks in chronological order (newest tracks on top) in our flash player widget.

Forss - Sets - SoundCloud

And here is how this will look like when embedded to another site (in this case, that’s my blog but you can also embed it to the sidebar of your blog or any of your profiles or sites that allow you to add html codes).

Echolot, a blog by David Noël - David Noël

One more little thing: you can now easily share a user’s URL (http://soundcloud.com/forss) to Facebook. Just add it to the “What’s on your mind?” field and it will post the player with the latest tracks to your Facebook stream. Have a look:

Facebook | Home

DavidDavid Weekend fun: Citysounds 2.0 Comments

Exactly one month ago, we introduced you to Citysounds.fm, a really cool mashup created by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud during the London Music Hack Day. Citysounds is built on top of the SoundCloud API and makes it easy to browse through SoundCloud tracks from a specific city around the world.

Today, Henrik and David inform us about a big update they just launched and let me tell you that it’s pretty exciting. They’ve added a great set of features and we think that the current look & feel is a big improvement. So what’s new?

Show more tracks from one city: when selecting a city on the frontpage, you’ll be able to click through to the city overview page where it will show you more tracks from that city:

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There is a set of new features added to each city overview page:

Browse: Listen to the latest tracks, browse through the most popular genres or just hit shuffle.

Interesting stats: San Francisco for instance has a total of 237 tracks and every week, an average of 37 new tracks are added which makes San Francisco the 10th most active city on Citysounds.fm (and SoundCloud for that matter). Currently, the most popular genres are Dubstep, House and Electro.

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There’s more:

Share via Twitter: If you’d like to share a city on Twitter, just hit the button on the bottom right of the page. In a new window, the city and link to Citysounds are already included. and you can edit your tweet if you like. Once posted, your name will be added to the list of Listeners. Really cool!

Browse more: on a city overview page, Citysounds will show you more cities from the same country. Or just hit Random City and it will randomly choose a city for you to discover. Trust me, there is music to discover from cities you’ve probably never heard of.

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Ever wondered what music they play in Budapest, Gent, Helsinki, Minsk or Tarragona? Check it out or start with the usual suspects London, Berlin or Los Angeles. Have a great weekend everyone!

Oh, one more thing: If you’re a developer and have other cool ideas like Citysounds you’d want to build, save the date: We’ll be holding a Music Hack Day in Berlin on September 21st/22nd 18th-20th. Stay tuned for details and make sure you block the date to join us for some music hacking. Details to follow.

DavidDavid Blogger.com integration Comments

Another week, another blogging service integrated to the Sharing option on SoundCloud. This week’s guest: Blogger.com.

Here’s your step-by-step guide to show you how easy it is to share your favorite tracks, sets and group sets to your blog hosted on Blogger.com.

Let’s start by looking at the Share options where you’ll see the Blogger logo:

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Now when you click it, we’ll ask you to authorize SoundCloud to connect with your Blogger account (you can always change the authorization settings in your Blogger/Google account):

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By clicking Go to Authorization, you’ll be redirected to the Google page (shown below) where you simply click Grant access. Once the access was granted, we will take you back to the page on SoundCloud to continue with your post.

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In the window pictured below, you’ll be able to edit your post title, add tags and write more about the track/set/group you wish to post. You can also save the post as a draft if you don’t want it to get posted immediately.

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Click Post and – Ta-da – you just blogged a SoundCloud track:

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DavidDavid SoundCloud gets full WordPress.com integration Comments

SoundCloud has been steadily growing popularity within the musical blogosphere. As well as our DropBox feature, which allows music bloggers to easily receive demos & promos, we’ve noticed more and more people using SoundCloud to embed music into their posts. So we’ve been working hard to make this easier and easier for bloggers.

Today’s ‘YAY!’-moment is triggered by the excitement to finally be able to announce the the full WordPress.com integration. It is now super-easy to share SoundCloud tracks & sets blogs hosted on WordPress.com. Here’s the run-down of how that works.

If you look at the “Share” option of a track, set or group, you’ll see that we’ve added WordPress to the list of services we support.

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Click on “WordPress” and you’ll be able to copy the shortcode to your clipboard and simply add it to the edit field of your blog:

WordPress Shortcode

This simple shortcode line in your Edit field…

Shortcode

… will turn into the good-looking SoundCloud player you all know:

SoundCloud Player

We think that’s pretty nifty, don’t you think? Oh and by the way: you can also customize the appearance of your the player and have it match the design of your blog. To do so, click on “customize your player” as seen in the first screenshot above.

Player customization

One more thing: if you run a self-hosted blog on WordPress, make sure to check out the updated version of the SoundCloud ShortCode Plugin over on WordPress Plugin Directory.

Huge thanks go out to Raanan over at WordPress.com for making this possible.

Update: Here’s the WordPress announcement. Great!

Update 2: And below, find a nice how-to video that just got posted over on WordPress.tv:

DavidDavid New feature: Push to other Social Networks Comments

We’re excited to share the news with you about a new feature we just launched. We weren’t quite sure how to name it so we’re just going to call it “Push to other Social Networks” as it best describes what it actually does. With this new feature you can easily manage on what social networks other than SoundCloud you’d like your events (new favorites and new public tracks & sets) to get published. We currently support Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Here it is:

Extensions

Find this feature in your Extensions settings. As you can see, the variety of settings gives you full control of what you’d like to see pushed to your other social profiles. You can also customize the messages for Facebook and MySpace to give it a personal touch.

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If you’re an admin of one or more Facebook Pages, the cool thing is that you can also select the pages you want your events to be pushed to from the menu highlighted below. So if you’re an artist with your own Facebook Page you can automatically push events to your personal and to your artist profile. It’s a brand-new feature that Facebook only made available a few days ago. Pretty cool, huh!

Extensions - SoundCloud

Once you’ve uploaded a track, set or have favorited a track, it will automatically show up on your social network profile. Here’s how it looks in your Facebook stream:

Facebook Stream

Hat tip to our developer Johannes who spent the last couple of days building this feature. As always, please let us know what you think in the comments.

Update: Here’s the screencast explaining how it works:

DaveDave We all wanna be Prince Comments

felix_contest_admat We’ve got another remix competition to tell you about. With what started as an ode to Prince turned summer banger, Felix Da Housecat has teamed up with Karmaloop to give you a chance to put your own touch on the track and win prizes in the process. Interested? For more information on the competition and to download the parts please visit the Karmaloop.com site. The original is really rather catchy, so we’re keen to hear what you’ll be coming up with.

And we’re excited because this is one of the first remix comps to be using the SoundCloud ‘groups’ feature. By doing so all the entries are added to the group and can then be published and embedded anywhere using its embeddable player. The player is automatically updated every time a new track is added and approved to the group. There’s already mixes rolling in… check it out below.