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.
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’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.
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).
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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):
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.
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.
Click Post and – Ta-da – you just blogged a SoundCloud track:
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.
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:
This simple shortcode line in your Edit field…
… will turn into the good-looking SoundCloud player you all know:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!
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:
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:
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.
Forums have always been great places for fans and producers to congregate and talk about the music they love. Whether it’s forums about specific genres, production tips or music software there are a lot of thriving communities out there. And SoundCloud is all about moving your music to where you really need it; to all the places where you want to discuss, share and play it. So here’s a short 5-step guide to show you how to allow SoundCloud tracks to be directly embedded into forum posts. It takes two minutes.
Note, to do this you’ll need to have administrative rights of the forum. If you’re just a user then you might want to send your admins a link to this post and ask nicely!
1) Go to your Admin Control Panel, then click on ‘Add New BB code‘ option under ‘Custom BB Codes‘.
Description:Embed the tracks from SoundCloud into your post. Use the track URL in your browser. For example, for http://soundcloud.com/forss/speech-craft-no-sleep-til-dawn-remix-by-forss it would be: [soundcloud]http://soundcloud.com/forss/speech-craft-no-sleep-til-dawn-remix-by-forss[/soundcloud]
3) Include a Button Image. (Note: this is optional but you should upload that image to your own server and host it from there: http://bit.ly/tV7mm).
4) Here’s the how it should all look:
5) Now, click ‘Save‘ and that’s it! Your users will have a SoundCloud button in their post forms now. They simply click on the cloud button and paste their track URL address.
P.S. If you’re a forum software developer yourself, don’t hesitate to contact us at api@soundcloud.com or SoundCloud Google Group. There is potential for more advanced forum integration with SoundCloud.
So you think you have mad production skills? Ready to show the world your remix talents? Here’s your chance to show Grammy® nominated Producer/DJ, Jay-J (Shifted Music, Moulton Studios) what you got! Head on over to the Shifted Music Remix Contest site to read all about it. Meanwhile here’s the original track to get your ears round…
There’s been a lot of buzz this week about the different ways that Moby has been using SoundCloud. And we really wanted to highlight two really cool associated apps that have been built.
First up the ’social music’ Moby app on Facebook that allows you to stream and buy Moby’s new album direct from his fan page. If you get three of your friends to listen too, you can buy the album straight from the app (both downloads and CDs) with a discount up to 20%. Pretty cool, click here to check it out. The app was built by the guys at iPlatform, if you’re an artist and interested in doing something similar here’s how to contact them
The second app, built by CultureJam, lets you listen to his new album and post a mini-review to your Twitter stream. After posting your review, you can download the title track ‘Wait For Me’ for free! Each month the most creative review will win a prize – the first prize being a signed print from Moby’s recent Little Idiot art exhibition in London. Go to http://twitter.moby.com to listen to the new album, tweet your review, and get your free download.
David
Updated: Announcing Music Hack Day in Berlin Comments
We’ve got another remix competition to tell you about. With what started as an ode to Prince turned summer banger, 
There’s been a lot of buzz this week about the different ways that 
