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.
The DropBox is one of the main ways for people to distribute their tracks to SoundCloud users – whether that’s labels receiving demos, DJ’s receiving promos or studios receiving masters etc. For many it’s become an essential part of their daily workflow. And so naturally the DropBox feature received a lot of attention by a couple of projects at Music Hack Day.
As we wrote about earlier this week, our API allows developers to build lots of cool tools to make doing the things that you need to do on SoundCloud much easier. One such tool that we wanted to get you excited about today is a new app called SoundDrop. Developed at Music Hack Day by Greg Lloyd, Arthur Carabott and Robin ‘DonkDJ‘ Watson, SoundDrop makes it easy for users to audition the tracks in their DropBox in one go by taking a carefully selected sample of each track and combining them as a single track in your SoundCloud account.
It’s not quite ready for primetime yet but we wanted to whet your appetites nonetheless. Here’s a quick teaser video so that you can check it out. Tell us what you think.
Another great hack created during Musichackday in London was the iPhone Music Visualiser by Matt Biddulph and George J Cook. It’s a pretty cool music visualizer for the iPhone that let’s you browse tracks on SoundCloud (using our API) and then launch a custom visualiser for a track of your choosing on your iPhone.
The visualiser is actually sending the track over to Echonest, a great audio analysis web service, and uses that data to drive the cocos2d-based visualisation. Check out the video to the right to see it in action! Note for example how the particle systems grow bigger once the track loudness goes up.
One of the coolest mashups that came out of the Music Hackday was definitely Citysounds.fm, built by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud. Citysounds.fm is a really great way of tuning in to the contemporary sound of cities around the world.
The tracks and city information is fetched from the SoundCloud API–in fact the list of cities and tracks is even updated in real time as new tracks roll into SoundCloud. Additionally, pictures for each city are fetched from Flickr.
Try listening to Tunapuna, Trinidad for danceable tropical rhythms or to Belgrade for some of that eastern Europe progressive. It’s surprising how distinctive cities sound around the world!
We should also mention that Citysounds.fm is built with Ruby on Rails using our excellent Ruby Gem. The gem makes it a breeze to integrate SoundCloud into your application. You can read more about it over at Github.
Last weekend a large part of our team took the early morning flight from Berlin to London for the first ever Music Hack Day. Clad in SoundCloud t-shirts and thirsty for code (and caffeine) everyone was ready to showcase what could be built using our open API. With over 200 developers attending as well as teams from companies such as Last.fm, Songkick, Echonest and the BBC it was a gathering of some of the best people in digital music.
But what does all this talk of hacking and coding actually mean for you, the regular user of SoundCloud? What is an API and why should you care?
Our API exposes the full range of SoundCloud functionality to allow developers to make lots of cool tools on top of this platform that we are building. It might seem all geeky and technical but all you need to worry about is that these tools make it even easier for you to manage your music at SoundCloud, whether it’s iPhoneapps, desktop uploaders or dropboxmanagers.
It also means that there are even more reasons to check that little box when you upload your tracks. By giving access to stream your public tracks cool things like CitySounds.fm, TheCloudPlayer and RadioClouds can be built giving more people the opportunity to enjoy and play your music. All this makes SoundCloud one of the smartest places on the web to put your music. We’ll be telling you more about some of the best things built during Music Hack Day over the coming days and weeks.
WhaSoup.io, people? Last week during Music Hack Day in London we had the chance to meet Christopher from micro-blogging platform Soup.io and quickly decided it would be a great idea to make it easy for users to share their SoundCloud tracks on Soup.io. Less than a week later and we’re all set!
If you have a (micro)blog over at Soup.io, you can now easily import publicly shared tracks from SoundCloud. Just head to your account, add any SoundCloud username to the list and it will automatically import the public tracks to your blog.
This is how your Soup.io blog looks after importing the tracks. Whenever you upload a public track to SoundCloud it will automatically be added. Pretty cool!
Also, much like the Posterous integration, whenever you’re on a SoundCloud track page (or any other page with SoundCloud tracks embedded for that matter) you can use the Soup.io bookmarklet to post a track with just one click:
Hats off to Christopher and the Soup.io team for getting this great new feature live so quickly. Try it out.
This just in from our favorite film maker Nikolaj Belzer who was hanging out with the SoundCloud team at the Sónar Festival in Barcelona recently. As you can tell from the video it was hard work… and hard core raving.
The video includes highlights like Forss epically failing to iron his shirt, Fever Ray playing live at Sónar by Night, Henrik arguing about the power of Twitter with an english girl, and lots of great rooftop parties.
Icke & Er and Bela B. are preparing a charity fundraising festival on the 19th of July 2009 in the Zitadelle Spandau/ Berlin, called „Ein Hartz für Berlin“ – all proceeds going towards „Berliner Tafel“. They wanted to add SoundCloud to the proceedings so have organised a remix competition that we’d like to tell you about.
For more details, listen to the track and download the acapella for remixing head over to their SoundCloud page. The best remixes will be put together on a special remix bundle and there’s some SoundCloud PRO accounts up for grabs too.
Matas
SoundCloud player in forums (5-step guide for SoundCloud BB code) Comments
There’s been a lot of buzz this week about the different ways that 
