It’s been another two hardcore work weeks at the SoundCloud HQ and the result is out now in the form of the Carly release, after NYC-based Carly Simon (famous at the office for her 1982 hit ‘Why’).

The big one for this release is the first version of contact lists. Yep, that’s right, the feature many of you have been craving for since months is now alive and kicking on the site. You can now manage your own contact lists of collaboration partners, VIP DJs, journalists, A-list music bloggers, etc and share tracks with them in a click. You’ll find it under the ‘People’ tab. Simply go there, create a list, upload a track using the normal upload process or edit an already uploaded track, select ‘Lists’ under private sharing and select one or more lists you’d like to share to. That’s it, you’ve now shared the track to the whole list!

Also, with this release we’d like to introduce our next screencast where Nils is covering how the DropBox makes receiving music on your label page or music blog really easy. The brilliant SoundCloud moving logo music is from an unreleased track by Carl Borg.

We’re of course talking about Sam Shackleton, one of the masterminds behind hyped dupstep label Skull Disco. Here’s a quote from a great interview with the man, where he motivates why he had to end their legendary London club night:

“I spend ages on the drum programming and chopping up, so I really need the time for that. I’m not a natural music maker. I love it, but I can’t bang out tunes like that, also I’m in my early thirties and just take more time to work things out than I used to, that and the fact that I’ve spent a lot of time destroying my brain cells one way or another.”

Sam in action at Sónar Festival 2008. Photo by Walter How.

In the Sam release, we’ve tweaked the main menu to make it more to the point. We’ve also put more focus on your tracks and sets under the “You”-tab, and added a new tab where you can check the looks of your public profile. You can also choose what you like to front your public profile with; tracks, sets, comments, favorites, who you are following or your followers. We’re now also showing how many people you are following and how many people who are following you in the public profiles.

We’ve also made album and track artworks clickable, so you can zoom them in and have a closer look (Check this Himuro Yoshiteru song, for example). Also, the widget has “Buy”-buttons for all the tracks that you have added a buy-link to (here, for example is Trickski’s brand new Facebook page with the Facebook player in place).

Also, in the sidebar of this blog, you’ll find our newly added mini Twitter feed.

And last, but not least, we’ve got screencast number two ready for you. This time Yanneck talks about how you can customize the frequency and amount of emails you get from the cloud by tuning your email notification preferences. This is time the sound logo soundtrack is from an unreleased tune by Forss.

SoundCloud: Customizing E-mail Notifications from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Will Oldham is better known as do-it-yourself punk-style-americana-folk-country singer Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. And the brand new version of SoundCloud that we just deployed is dedicated solely to him! There’s another Will that we also love and respect, and this one goes out to him as well…

The set views and players have gotten much love from Katharina and Matas. Now they are in great shape!

We’ve also been listening closely to your feedback regarding security for streaming audio and upload performance and have some big updates for that in the pipeline. So stay tuned for a featured-packed release coming up.

Today we’re also launching a screencast series created by our own in-house (that’s house as in deep house) superstar Yanneck. The first one launched today shows how to use SoundCloud to upload and send a track to somebody. It also features a moving version of our logo with music by office favorite Carl Borg (it’s from a private, unreleased track on SoundCloud, ask him if you’d like to listen to the full track). Here you go:

We also wrote up some guidelines for how and how not to behave on SoundCloud, we call them the Cloudlines.

And here’s a bonus video by the Prince for you:

It’s been a great last few weeks at SoundCloud, a ton of fun stuff going on in and around the cloud! A bunch of great musicians, bloggers, and labels have begun using our cloud tools on a day-to-day basis, and they seem to really dig it. And we’ve been working our asses off lately perfecting some hot new features that we’re proud to roll out today. The name of this release is Tanith, after the living Berlin techno legend who recently made an appearance in the brilliant documentary “We call it techno!” and… drumroll… on SoundCloud with a super-dark dubstep mover that we’ve heard over and over with terrified pleasure in the office lately.

Ok, now to the point! Without further ado we’d love to present the new SoundCloud player:

Yes, what you see is not a test–it’s the brand new sets widget player in action. Use it to put your music anywhere on the web with a simple cut-and-paste maneuver, from MySpace to blogs to your very own site. We’re also using some black magic behind the curtains to find out where players are embedded on the web, and soon you’ll be able to see details about this in the stats graphs for your tracks.

Also, we’ve got some news for all the people using our DropBox solution. You can now see with a glance on your dashboard if new stuff has been dropped in your DropBox since you last checked it.

And, oh yes, we now support more or less all formats in the known audio world. So, if you’re so inclined, please do share your audiophile 192Khz 32 bit little-endian PCM Stereo WAV files with your friends…

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.

Dear music lovers,

for a while now SoundCloud has been growing steadily as a private beta version accessible only to a lucky few… After months of hunting bugs, listening to the requests of our beloved users and tweaking the site into perfection, we feel SoundCloud is ready for the next step. Pretty soon we’ll be opening the site up a little bit for more users (invite’s will still be required for accounts) and this calls for a release-party!

To celebrate this special event, we’d like to invite you to storm the top floor & roof-top of the Postfuhramt and turn it into a crazy dancefloor on Sunday the 11th of May from brunch-time (2pm) until late!

Since music is what we love, we managed to get a pretty insane list of DJ’s, musicians, performers and all-round music nutters to rock with you. Expect everything from deep house to bass-filled dubstep to garage rock to electro-pop and beyond. Come over and check out performances from over 20 (!) acts throughout the day & night!

We’re starting at 2pm with a rooftop brunch and will be supplying food and drinks all through the day/night/morning. So, we’d love you to join us to check out the sun & great music from the roof of the classic Postfuhramt building.

We’re all looking forward parting with you on Sunday!

• What: Release-party / brunch with over 20 DJs, musicians & performers
• When: 11:th of May from 2pm until late
• Where: SoundCloud, Auguststrasse 5a , 10117 Berlin, Germany (The postfuhramt building)
• What to bring: sun-cream & dancing-shoes

Update! Here’s the list of confirmed acts (subject to change still):

Mesak (FI), Fabio Genito (IT), Cornelia (SE, Live), Le Choix (SE, Live), Little Jinder (SE, Live), Bookhouse Boys (SE, Live), Kalle Kuts (GER), Snax (US, Live PA), Trickski (GER), Quarion (CH), Jack Migger (GER, Live), Ben Mono (GER), Michelle Owen (AUS), Noema (GER), Dirk Rumpff (GER), Andre Lodemann (GER), Hunee (GER), Hauke Freer (GER), DJ Humus (IL), Cloud (SE), Barbara Hallama (GER), Yeah Fool! (SE/US), Der Klaus (GER), Exit Ghost (GER), SoundCloud DJ team (SE-GER)

The winter is slowly dying away, the temperature is rising, the sun is peeping down on the Berlin streets and most people have already started lounging around outside again. Sipping Lattes, brunching away and taking it easy. We say “most people” since at SoundCloud we’ve been ignoring spring while being über-busy crafting one of our biggest releases ever! There’s so much to talk about but we’ve actually decided to keep this post fairly simple as we need some sleep right about now Much more detailed info on the new stuff will follow in a few separate posts explaining all the ins and outs.

So, anyway, this one is our “Fabio”-release, in honor of House maestro and one of the original SC supporters Fabio Genito. Grazie Mille Fabio!

The first things you might notice is the new SC logo, new tighter colour-scheme, cleaner dashboard, restructured menus & an even slicker & more kick-ass user-experience! That’s the start.
Then there’s some pretty sick stuff… automatic waveform-resizing. Check it out by going to a track and resizing your browser window. Enjoy the magical resizing of the track waveform to make full use of your entire browser window. If you’ve got a huge monitor in the studio this is a pretty nice one!

Oh, and we almost forget. Anybody wanted some sets?

This is a big one so there might be a bug or two in there – let us know and give us lots of feedback on this one!

Just a quick post to welcome out latest release Debbie into the world (wide web). Its live right now so, as usual, give it a spin and let us know what you think.

This release brings a whole lot of behind the scenes work on security & other important stuff like that. But of course there’s always a few new visible features too. For example, all the peepz who like to keep their stuff organized can now remove items from their own dashboard. So if you like to keep things neat and tidy your dashboard is ready to serve you. And, to keep things tidy in your email inbox you now have a few more options for controlling exactly when, what and how you get your email-notifications, check it out in the email settings.

You’ll also find some extra goodness on most buttons, give them a click and see. Then there’s also a few nice extra features concerning id3 tags but these we’ll keep a bit quiet about those until you find them!

Remember, its spring-time, so close the laptop every now and then, get yourself an ice-cream & watch the beautiful clouds. Cheers.

Welcome to another chapter of the fabulous & ongoing SoundCloud saga! Working in the Clouds is not always easy, bugs need to be squashed and germanism needs getting to grips with (check out our startup mode adventures). But nevertheless, we all feel we’re slowly but surely approaching a revolutionary platform, piece by piece. This latest piece is dedicated to remixer-extraordinaire Ewan Pearson, an artist who has constantly been pushing the musical boundaries and whose recent album Piece Work regroups most of his greatest remixes.

So what’s new in the Ewan release? Well, ta-da, you asked for it and you got it – now you can now add much more information about your tracks! New fields such as “genre”, “key”, “label”, “release date”, “track type”or “keywords/tags”  allow you to give an accurate description of your music (but, of course, it’s all optional). Plus you now have the possibility to provide a direct link to an online shop of your choice that sells the track.

To add info to tracks you’ve already uploaded just head into the tracks edit mode and go for it. For new tracks you’ll have the option to add as much extra info as you like right from the regular upload page.

We’ve also reworked the “settings” page a bit, using the “Actions” menu to allow you easily jump to a specific field of information that needs changing. It is now also possible to change your user name, add additional e-mail addresses and we also support more types of Discogs links.

So, big thanks for all the support, enjoy Ewan and have an awesome weekend!

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!