The fine peeps over at French label Infiné Music chose SoundCloud and the group feature to find tracks to be compiled on the upcoming yet-to-be-named mix series by French DJ & composer Agoria. You may remember his 2007 compilation At The Controls that topped the end-of-the-year writers poll of Resident Advisor – described as “one of the finest and era-defining” compilations and “the canon by which every other recorded mixes will have to be judged by”. Sounds thrilling.

Grab the bull by the horns and submit your track (of any style!) to his group on SoundCloud until October 27th. If you get picked by Agoria, you and your track will be featured on the new mix 12”.

In our last blog post we mentioned a few really cool ways that people were using SoundCloud and we’d like to tell you about another one. This time it’s all in the name of a good cause!

We know that many of you are on Twitter because we see you all busy using SoundCloud’s ’share via Twitter’ social feature that we launched last year. If you’re one of these people then you should definitely get involved in Twestival.fm (a sister-site to Twestival, the festival taking place in 184 cities worldwide on 12th February).

The organisers are asking artist, bands and labels to donate tracks via their SoundCloud Dropbox. These tracks will then be made available for streaming and download between the 5th and 19th February at the Twestival.fm website using a SoundCloud player. The site is hoping to raise $20,000 by asking visitors to leave a tip in a Radiohead ‘pay what you want’ style. All money raised will go directly to charity: water to help build five new drinking wells in places where many have no access to fresh water.

You can donate your track via the DropBox below or simply share a track you already have in the Cloud with http://soundcloud.com/twestival

Donate your track

We look forward to seeing how the campaign runs!

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• Twestival! A Worldwide Event for Charity:Water 2-12 (electricpromotions.com)
• Mashable and Twestival Announce Global Media Partnership (mashable.com)

News has been reaching us of some really exciting contests going on in the Cloud at the moment. It’s great to see lots of users being creative with their SoundCloud players and dropboxes. And for budding producers and SoundCloud users it means the chance to win some fantastic prizes!

Get Physical have a fantastic new concept album due out on 6th February called Final Song #01. It might sound a bit morbid but the album is a collection of records that the artists would like to be played at their funeral or hear before they die: the track that is so important to them it should be played for eternity. And they’re letting SoundCloud users join in the fun. Have you produced a song that you’d like to hear before you die? If so, upload it to the Final Song dropbox and if your track is selected you’ll win some great prizes!

Roll Records have really gone all out and are offering the chance to win a 20” iMac by remixing Reead. Who doesn’t want to win a 20” iMac? Make sure you check out this competition that Roll Records is running in association with DJDownload. Closing date for entries to their dropbox is 15th February.

The Dandy Warhols are also making use of SoundCloud for their remix competition. We only just found out about this one so there’s not much time left to enter a remix. But check out all the stems and more information on their SoundCloud page or get them right here:

Compost are offering you the chance to rework ‘Aurevoir’ a track taken from Alif Tree’s second album ‘Clockwork’ available spring 2009. Prizes include a full release of the remix on Compost Records, a free SoundCloud Pro account and a delightfully put together care-package with 50 vinyls or CD’s picked out from the Compost vaults. The deadline for remix submissions is Sunday 15th March, so get over to Compost’s page and get busy!

If you’re using SoundCloud in a really interesting way then we’d love to hear about it.

As a pre-christmas present to everyone with a PRO Standard or Max account we’ve now made it possible to customize your DropBox page even more than before. Choose your favorite colors with the color picker and use it for the background, header text and body or just upload some nice images, it’s all up to you! This is great for syncing the DropBox page with the design of your label page or music blog. Check for example the great DropBoxes of Discobelle, Pentagonik, A Guy Called Gerald, Cornelia and IndieShows.

A How To guide and some inspiration can be found in the Customize your DropBox screencast:

SoundCloud: Customize your DropBox from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Happy customization!

P.S. Would you like your music to be featured in future SoundCloud screencasts? Simply drop your track with a note in my DropBox.

Speedy J (Jochem Paap) is doing an interesting project that we really like. It goes by the name of Open Collabs, and it’s a sort of über-collaborative album where Speedy J will take the stuff you send him and work it into new pieces consisting of many small fragments provided by the community and Mr. Paap himself. The finished album will be release on his label Electric Deluxe, and profits will be shared with all artists appearing on it 50/50. If you want your material to be on the album, you must submit your parts before December 1st. So head over to the Open Collabs site to register! You can then discuss the project directly with Jochem over at our forum. There’s also a FAQ if you need to know more specifics.
Here are some examples of what you could send:

What’s really cool is that the entire process of creating this album is supported by SoundCloud. Speedy J uses the DropBox for receiving parts, the player to display the works in progress and the API to visualize the process of creation…

Needless to say, we’re really looking forward to hearing what comes out of this!

Btw, if you check out the Open Collabs DropBox, you’ll notice that it looks really fresh. That’s because he’s using a new feature that we launched today for PRO Max and Medium accounts called “branded DropBox”. It gives you full control of the appearance of your DropBox. If you have a PRO Max or Medium account you can enable it here. More on this coming soon!

As you might know we have a feature on SoundCloud that we call the DropBox. It let’s anyone send you mixes, tracks and sounds right to your SoundCloud account using our slick and easy uploader. The feature is especially useful for labels that receive a lot of demos but also for ex. music bloggers that get’s a lot of music sent their way.

Some two weeks back we built a small app for Facebook to enable putting the DropBox widget on your profile and pages in an easy way. So if you want friends and fans to send you music the Facebook way, head over to the app and install it.

Install the SoundCloud DropBox!

And by the way, I hope you haven’t missed that you can have both your sets and single tracks on Facebook aswell, complete with timed comments, a crisp waveform and all!

Get the SoundCloud Player here!

It’s been a while! Summer has arrived in Berlin, and the football-madness too… Our superstar DJ and good colleague, Yanneck (a.k.a. Quarion), is in a plane right now to Australia where he’ll be touring for two weeks… too bad he missed our little rooftop release barbecue last night with fashion label WoodWood. He’ll be greeting the clubkids (and the Kangaroos) from us instead.

Boy, was it worth celebrating good things last night! We just deployed our Rupert release, named after drum’n'bass hero Rupert Parkes, a.k.a. Photek (Forss, btw, is his greatest fan). And we’ve got a few serious upgrades to the cloud:

• You can now embed public tracks on any site, blog or MySpace-profile! Just click the ‘Share’-button, copy the embed-code, and put our kick-ass player wherever you like. You can even change the color to match your page designs and make sure the player is all pimped up to your own style.
• All users on SoundCloud now have DropBoxes, which means you can let anybody send you a track in the slickest way imaginable. Just put a dropbox link or embed-badge on your site/myspace and you’re ready to receive music without going fu*cking insane. The DropBox is really useful if you’re an A&R, label or music blogger and receiving lots of tracks. Sonar Kollektiv and a bunch of other labels are already using it (check Sonar Kollektiv’s contact page) to receive their new tracks. “Dropped” tracks will end up in the DropBox section of your dashboard, and they will appear in your digest mails. We’ve kept them separate from your other stuff so they stay out of the way until you’re ready to check them. The DropBox makes it super easy to receive larger amounts of new tracks and scan through them really fast without having to download everything first.
• We’ve changed the names “your contacts” to “people you follow” and “your fans” to “people who are following you”. Things still work the same as before but it puts emphasis on the fact that at SoundCloud you can add/follow people without them having to add/follow you back (and vice versa have people following/adding you without you having to receive their updates). It’s a bit different but should make more sense then the whole friend/contact social network thingie we hope.

That’s it! This week us SoundClouders will be travelling, stopping by Barcelona the Sonar Festival and London for London Calling so let us know if you feel like hooking up.

Stay cool in the summer heat, or stay hot in the australian winter cool.