You’ve probably discovered them by now and we’re super-excited about all the feedback you’ve given us so far:

Our two new widgets.

They’re called the Mini and Artwork player and come o top of the standard Waveform player that has been around for some time. We built these two new widgets based on your suggestions from the past couple of months.

To grab one of the players, find the track or set you would like to embed, click “Share” and “Customize Player”. This will open a panel in which you can select the player you want and also customize the general appearance and size to make it fit in nicely with the design of your artwork or website.

The Artwork Player focuses entirely on the image artwork you upload for with a track or set and comes with all usual info and additional options like download and buy links. Perfect for showcasing your album. Here’s Fever Ray’s latest self-titled album:

The Mini Player is quite the opposite and reduces the player to a single line of text (track or set title and your username). Clicking the Play button will reveal the waveform, only slightly smaller than usual:

Sexy, aren’t they? Check this out.

Both new players come with each of our Premium accounts.

Kudos to our kick-ass frontend duo Katharina and Matas for a job well done.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone!

Tuesday’s Taylor release revealed two new apps built by our friends Christian Stropp and Dorian Roy. The apps are built on top of the SoundCloud API and are very similar in terms of features – letting you upload audio to your SoundCloud account by simply dragging and dropping files onto the apps.

• Christian’s app is called CloudPost and works on Mac OS 10.5 or later.

• Dorian’s app is called Scup and works on both Windows and Mac OS but you need to have Adobe AIR installed.

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Note that these apps are not maintained by SoundCloud. Please send feedback and bug reports to Christian and Dorian. Also, CloudPost is open source if you want to contribute to the project.

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The first time you launch your desktop uploader you need to connect the app with your SoundCloud account.

Just click the button and you are automatically forwarded to SoundCloud where you can allow access to your account.

Note that the app is not storing your SoundCloud password. Instead it gets a temporary key that you can make unusable anytime by revoking the access on your account settings page. This is good if you for instance work temporarily on someone else’s computer.

Once the app is authorized you can start dragging files onto the drop window.

The files are uploaded automatically but set to private by default so no one can access them until you hit “Send Set”.

You can add information and drag artwork onto the image box. You can also add more tracks by dragging files onto the application.

If you make the set private you can enter email addresses to the people you want to share with.

When you are done with the settings, hit “Send Set” and the set ends up on your account page.

We think these apps are pretty cool and would like to thank Christian and Dorian for developing them! Try it out and let them (and us) know what you think.

Private sharing of your tracks and sets has always been a pretty easy thing to do on SoundCloud. I recently had the chance to speak with Aaron Albano (aka Ming), who as a producer based in NYC, has used these private sharing features during the production of one the new tracks by Aussie band Youth Group (make sure to check out this great video to see Ming talk about the experience). He loved the idea of the Secret Link and said it would definitely make things even easier.

With the Taylor release, we pushed a new feature called Secret Link. It really does what it says: upload a track or set, generate a secret link and simply pass it on via email or instant messenger. We think that will come in quite handy especially when sharing with people who are not on SoundCloud or not as tech-savvy as we all are. Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s how it works:

You’ll find the feature in your track or set settings. Simply check the box “Enable Secret Link” and don’t forget to save the settings at the bottom of the page to activate the link. Copy and paste this link and share it via email, instant messenger or make it a temporary exclusive to your followers on Twitter or Facebook.

To deactivate the Secret Link, click the circled arrow on the right and the link will be made redundant.

The Secret Link comes with all Premium accounts starting with new yearly account called ‘Lite’ for €29.

What do you think? Leave your feedback in the comments.

… we just want to say that SoundCloud just pushed the best release of all time. The best release of all time!

Friends of the Cloud, we’re happy to announce the release of Taylor, named after Taylor Swift, who had a fun encounter with *the* Kanye. This was big news for both Taylor and Kanye and it’s major news for SoundCloud as it’s our biggest update ever.

We’ll be posting an ongoing series of blog posts with details about each new feature in the next few days and here’s a quick overview of what’s happening today. Click the links below to discover more on our fresh new product pages.

Two new player widgets: the Artwork and Mini player. Here’s the Artwork player with the Crooked Vultures song New Fang. Sexy, isn’t it – perfect for your album pre-releases.

Easier private sharing with the Secret Link: share a private url via email and IM

Stats-o-rama: completely revamped stats. Be in the know about the who, what, when, which and wheres around your tracks.

Bringing back the original metric of music: total minutes. SoundCloud becomes your tape in the cloud. Erase & rewind, upload & remove as many tracks as you want within your total amount of minutes. Click here to learn about the different minute packs.

Extended privacy options: disable comments, hide stats and make comments private.

Housekeeping: all PRO accounts are now known as Premium accounts. Check out the full lowdown.

Introducing the new Premium account called ‘Lite’, the perfect entry-level account that lets you dive straight into the premium features for only €29.

Cheaper Premium accounts: we just lowered the price of the yearly Solo, Pro and Pro Plus accounts (€79, €250, €500).

Scup and Cloudpost: two new little apps that let you upload straight from your desktop (note: both are beta).

Oh. One more thing: the iPhone app, it’s finally here. Get it in the app store for €0,79 or $0,99.

Cool? We think so too. Pretty much every new feature was developed based on the awesome feedback you have given us in the past months. We hope you like the new stuff we’ve been working on and please don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in the comments.

SoundCloud users and DJ/production duo Dirty Secretz just tweeted a link to their Facebook page where they managed to do a really nice integration between Facebook and SoundCloud that we’d like to share with you. This is the landing page of Dirty Secretz’ artist page on Facebook:

Clicking on “Check out our Tracks” will redirect you to the Tracks tab in the top menu where they have embedded their set. Also very nice, instead of simply choosing auto-play, they have a prominent button in the center that will start playing the tracks when clicking Play:

They’ve also done this for the Remix tab:

The best part: they’re sharing with us and you how they made it so you can go ahead and create something similar. For you tech-heads out there, install the Facebook Static FBML app, then follow the instructions posted here and add the link to the .swf from the embed code you want to add. If you need help, send them a shout via Twitter head over here to get the full instructions. Nice!

Thanks, guys! Very beautiful.

Here’s a quick one that will come in handy for track titles that are a little longer than usually. Until now, the permalink of your track got automatically generated from the track title. That changes today with the new little feature that lets you edit the permalinks of your tracks. You’re able to do that directly on the upload page and also later in your track settings.

The two nice little screen grabs below will help you find it.

Here’s the upload page:

And here’s how it looks in your track settings (also works for tracks you have already uploaded) – don’t forget to save:

One important note: if you change the permalinks of existing tracks, please note that this will also affect links & widgets you’ve posted across the web. Please update these accordingly.

Have an awesome 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.

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.

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.

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: