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.