FiRe, the popular iPhone field recorder app by our friends at Audiofile Engineering has been updated to version 1.3.0.

The new version adds features like input processing effects powered by iZotope, expanded metadata support, file encoding, and more. The SoundCloud integration has also been polished to make it even smoother to export your iPhone recordings to the cloud.

Check out all the new features and get FiRe 1.3.0 in the App Store.

Record anywhere and upload to SoundCloud straight from the app.

If you’re into hacking, music and Amsterdam, this one’s for you. Our friends Edial & Roel who just recently relocated to Berlin are co-organizing the Music & Bits conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday, October 21st. Pre-conference to the Amsterdam Dance Event, Music & Bits is merging music & technology and will also be the forum for the next Music Hack Day.

The program looks great and the list of speakers that will participate in both the conference and the Music Hack Day sounds exciting: Anthony of the Hype Machine, Matthew from Last.fm, Brian from The Echo Nest, Andie from RjDj and Dave & Eric from team SoundCloud will be joined by hackers from all across Europe to prototype awesome new projects on top of the companies API’s in just one day.

The event is free, if you haven’t registered yet and want to do so, click here.

TracksOnAMap is an outcome of the Berlin Music Hackday. It was built by Johan Uhle (with the help of our own Katharina and Eric) on top of the SoundCloud API and features hundreds of recent tracks uploaded to SoundCloud in thousands of different locations around the globe.

To get started, simply zoom in to a location of your choice and click the purple dots – each dot shows that there are tracks available in that area, the bigger the dots, the more tracks for you to check out.

Pictured above, you’ll see a recent track coming straight out of San Francisco – Bassnectar with a preview of his remix he did for Fever Ray’s ‘When I Grow Up‘. On the upper right corner of the window you can share the link to the city on Twitter and Facebook or just copy the direct link (see picture on the right). Below the track playing, you’ll be able to select more tracks from the same location.

In the main player you’ll find direct links to the artist and track on SoundCloud and you can also link back to that specific track on TracksOnAMap via Facebook & Twitter. If you wish to just randomly discover tracks, hit the arrow on the right and the app will take you on a trip around the world to a city of its choice. Clicking on a genre below the player will filter the tracks according to how they were tagged by a SoundCloud user.

We like it a lot! Nice work, Johan.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

As you’ve probably noticed, our wrapper announcements come often these days. Today we’re adding a PHP wrapper written by Anton Lindqvist to the list of available libraries for the SoundCloud API. Here you’ll find the documentation.

PHP is a widely used scripting language and the addition of this wrapper will open up for SoundCloud integration in a wide range of web services.

Check the list of application ideas and start hacking right away – even if you’re not planning to attend the music hack day tonight at Radialsystem V in Berlin.

We encourage 3rd party developers to join our API group and follow @soundcloudapi on twitter to get updates and take part in the discussions!

Today we have yet a new API announcement – a universal SoundCloud API wrapper for Flash, Flex and AIR projects, written in ActionScript 3.0.

It’s written by Dorian Roy and here’s a quote from his blog:

This library enables your Flash or Flex projects to communicate with SoundCloud’s API to upload tracks, create playlists, edit user info and so on. It handles all the complicated OAuth authentication in the background so you only have to deal with a few simple methods.

Here you’ll find more info and a quick start tutorial for how to connect a Flash app to SoundCloud.

We sure hope so because we are. Everything seems to be in place and the feedback has been phenomenal. Tomorrow night, we’ll be welcoming close to a hundred hackers and company representatives from all around Europe and even Boston.

Here’s a quick round-up:

• Location: Radialsystem V, Studio B&C, Holzmarktstr. 33. The Berlin. Gmaps link.
• Click here for timings and a tentative schedule.

We would like to thank all of our great sponsors for helping us making this possible. Without them, it would have been impossible to realize this in such a short time. Your support is much appreciated, we mean it:

• Breakfast Saturday: provided by Cloudspeakers
• Lunch Saturday: provided by Ableton
• Dinner Saturday: provided by Tape.tv
• Breakfast Sunday: provided by De:Bug
• Lunch Sunday: provided by Mr. Wong
• Location & Infrastructure Sponsors: Nokia, Press Pause Play, Native Instruments and The unbelievable Machine Company
• Softdrink & Beer Sponsors: Red Bull, Ableton, Future Audio Workshop and Tape.tv
  

We’re super-excited about the weekend and can’t wait to see you all there. To those of you who can’t make it to Berlin this time: don’t worry, looks like there will be more Hack Days all around the world: Boston, Amsterdam, NYC. Even Mumbai is in the talks. Keep an eye out for updates.

Let’s do this!

Photo credit: Ben Matthew Reyes via Flickr

Today we’re very excited about adding a C wrapper to the list of libraries for the SoundCloud API. It’s written by Dave Gamble and supports OAuth 1.0a among other nifty features. With a few lines of code you can build desktop apps that can do things like:

• Exporting audio to SoundCloud
• Play the latest tracks shared publicly or privately
• Handling track comments
• And more…

Still two days left until Music Hack Day but check out the documentation and start hacking right away to get ahead of the competition with your C based SoundCloud apps. Also check out the featured apps and application ideas if you need inspiration to get going.

It’s been a while since our last teamster interview so we thought to share the news with you today about our latest addition to the team. Henrik joins the rest of the gang. Read on…

• Welcome to the team, Henrik! Could you tell us how you fell in love with computers & technology in general and how you ended up moving to Berlin to join SoundCloud?

Thanks, I’m really excited to be here! The short version is that I bought Cubase to learn about music production when I was about sixteen. Music and technology have always been my main interests (alongside sports) and I fell in love with the idea of combining them. I got into professional sound engineering and radio production but eventually felt like doing something different and began studying.

Engineering physics was totally boring but I specialized in interaction design which is a really interesting subject. I did my thesis work at Propellerhead Software and stayed there to work with the beta testing of Record. It was a great experience and I learned a lot about the music technology industry and software development in general.

I had met Eric and Alex through university so I used to pop by the SoundCloud office whenever I was visiting Berlin. Applying for this job was a natural decision since I had plans to move to Berlin and really like the SoundCloud spirit. I knew I wanted to keep working with music and technology and this job also gives me the opportunity to learn more about the web.

• How have you been enjoying Berlin so far and what do you think is so special about Berlin?

It’s been a lot more work and a lot less clubbing this time, but I’m really looking forward to start building a new life here and see the city from that perspective. Berlin has a special atmosphere and I think it’s the most interesting city in Europe right now, at least for people like me. I believe it will continue to evolve in interesting ways and it’s great to be part of that.

• Tell us a little bit more about what you’re working on right now.

I’m getting everything in place for setting up new partnerships and also making sure all ongoing projects run smoothly. It will be very interesting to see how we can improve the musical web by integrating applications and services with SoundCloud.

• What sort of music do you like? What are your favorite artists?

I mainly listen to electronic music, especially when I work, but I also like pop and hip hop. Here are some artists to give you a better feeling for what I like at the moment: Kollektiv Turmstrasse, Mathias Kaden, Intrusion, Burial, Junior Boys, Empire of the Sun, Bon Iver, and Gang Starr. Perhaps I should also mention that I was a fan of Eric’s (Forss) album Soulhack before I got to know him.

Thanks!

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:

• Breakfast Saturday: provided by Cloudspeakers
• Lunch Saturday: provided by Ableton
• Dinner Saturday: provided by Tape.tv
• Breakfast Sunday: provided by De:Bug
• Lunch Sunday: provided by Mr. Wong
• Location & Infrastructure Sponsors: Nokia, Press Pause Play, Native Instruments and The unbelievable Machine Company
• Softdrink & Beer Sponsors: Red Bull, Ableton, Future Audio Workshop and Tape.tv
  

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

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:

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.

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.