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‘.

2) Enter the following info into the form fields:

Title: SoundCloud

BB Code Tag Name: soundcloud

Replacement: <object height="81" width="100%"><param name="movie" value="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url={param}&amp;g=bb"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed allowscriptaccess="always" height="81" src="http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url={param}&amp;g=bb" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%"></embed></object> <a href="{param}">{param}</a>

Example: [soundcloud]http://soundcloud.com/matas/hobnotropic[/soundcloud]

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.

Miss Caroline Hervé says it best as she describes her new “Batbox” album: “Let the bats fly out of your head! Goodbye old ghosts!” We felt we had to do the same and got rid of the “FANS” sharing mode! And for that, we’ve dedicated our latest release to her: Caroline aka Miss Kittin is ready for you & we’re ready for her.

The reason for this little feature slashing was mainly to make the upload interface even simpler & smoother with only two sharing modes: public & private (less buttons is gooooodness). Plus, we figured the “Fans” mode was kind of unnecessary since we could add the exact same functionality to the private sharing mode instead.

If you want to share music to all the peepz who are your fans, the new way of doing it is to select “private” and click one feature (”select all” from your list of fans). The result is exactly the same as with the “Fans” mode, but with less buttons.

For those of you that feel you might suffer from this loss, fear not, as we’re kick-starting something that will allow you to participate even more in SoundCloud’s further developments: the SC Forums.

So, from today on, you’ll have an open space for sharing your views, ideas and critics on SoundCloud with other artists and, of course, us, the peepz building the site for you. Oh, by the way, in case you just want to hang out and talk music in the forums that’ll be OK too… See you there, last one in is a yousendspaceitwhat user!

We hope you enjoy our “Caroline” release and we’re looking forward to hear your feedbacks!