Tag Archives: music

David Updated: Announcing Music Hack Day in Berlin

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

Eric The Sound of the Cities – Presenting Citysounds.fm

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.

Eric QC Mixtapes and the Mixcloud

It’s great to see all the cool stuff people are building on the SoundCloud API and our widgets. Here’s one project that we’d like to highlight, it’s a mixtape site called QC Mixtapes and they have a feature built on SoundCloud called the Mixcloud. Here you can browse mixes from different genres in a really smooth way. If you’re a DJ and you’re reading this you can easily submit your mix to the site by sending a message to QC Mixtapes on SoundCloud with a link to your mix on SoundCloud.
Here we are browsing the ‘funk’ genre:

Here’s the single page for a mix:

They’ve also built a Facebook app, so you can share mixes you like there.

All in all, great stuff!