A lot of developers asked for it and now you can has it: programming level access to the SoundCloud Widget Player.

Via the new Widget API you can access functions like play and pause, show additional info about the currently playing track on your page or even hide our widget and create your own JavaScript based interface for it.

Check out this demo and some code examples. It only takes a few lines like:

soundcloud.addListener('onPlayerReady', function(player, data) {
  console.log("widget ready, let's play");
  player.api_play();
});

The Widget API also integrates nicely with the popular JavaScript frameworks jQuery and Prototype.

The source code is available at github together with the documentation.

We’re curious to hear what you think so please post feedback and feature requests in our Google group. You are also welcome to contribute to the project if you think there’s something missing.

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!

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:

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.

We’ve seen a lot of sites and projects using the SoundCloud API in the last few weeks, and of course we’re super-excited about this! One thing we’ve noticed is that a few of these projects have used Javascript-based players to play back the audio. Check for example the slick and minimalistic player on electronica label Pluxemburg’s new site, or the player on the innovative crowd-sourced site Listen to Blogs. They both use their own Javascript-based players powered by the SoundCloud API. This is a nice technique (that we’re also using ourselves on soundcloud.com) since it gives you full control over the look’n'feel and also enables tight integration with the rest of the site.

Realising that using Javascript to build music players for your SoundCloud-powered sites is becoming increasingly popular, we decided to share some of our knowledge in this area. So without further ado we’d like to announce the open-source SoundCloud Javascript-based player! It’s a simple, extensible, great-looking player based on SoundManager 2 and jQuery. It takes the shape of a customizable jQuery plugin, that let’s you create a player with one line of javascript, for any link to a SoundCloud-track on your page. Simply put this in your HTML:

<a class="soundcloud-player" href="http://soundcloud.com/forss/flickermood">Play</a>

And put this in your javascript:

$("a.soundcloud-player").scPlayer();

And voilà, you have a player on your page!
Check it out and view live examples here.

We have now deployed a major update for our player application for Facebook. It has been three weeks of hard coding from Johan to get it ready and working for the new Facebook design and platform. We also added some features that we hope you’ll enjoy.

First of all we have made the interface a bit better and easier to understand. It’s not a complicated app but we really want everyone understand how to get their favorite tracks on profiles and pages. Want to read about how it works? Click on the help link next to the headline.

We also added full feed support. This means that every time you add a track, a story will end up in your network’s feed, perfect for taking your tracks on a viral spin. And If you should find a track you like on someone else’s feed, page or profile you can easily add it to yours by clicking the “Add this track to my profile”-button.

A minor update was also made on the SoundCloud side of things. The “Share on Facebook” button is now connected to the Player application so when you hit “Share” the track will be loaded into the application and added to your feed. This makes it much easier to share your favorites even outside of SoundCloud.

Last but not least, you can now also choose whether to show the track comments or not.

If you find any glitches or have any suggestions on how to make the application even better, head over to our page on Get Satisfaction. Happy Facebooking!

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!