It’s time for yet an announcement for all you API lovers out there; a library making it really easy to implement SoundCloud streaming in your Cocoa apps. It’s built specially for the iPhone SDK 3.+ but should work for desktop Mac apps as well.

The library is a vital part of the SoundCloud iPhone app and will be used in the upcoming CitySound iPhone app as well. It’s written by Ullrich Schäfer and open source under the Apache License version 2.0.

To sum up, this library…

• makes it easy to implement the non trivial task of streaming audio in Cocoa apps
• nicely integrates with the existing Cocoa wrapper for the SoundCloud API
• supports streaming of public and OAuth protected tracks
• fits in commercial apps as well as music hack day mashups etc.

Head over to github and check out the source code along with the demo application.

Feedback, questions, and suggestions are welcome in the SoundCloud API Google group!

… we just want to say that SoundCloud just pushed the best release of all time. The best release of all time!

Friends of the Cloud, we’re happy to announce the release of Taylor, named after Taylor Swift, who had a fun encounter with *the* Kanye. This was big news for both Taylor and Kanye and it’s major news for SoundCloud as it’s our biggest update ever.

We’ll be posting an ongoing series of blog posts with details about each new feature in the next few days and here’s a quick overview of what’s happening today. Click the links below to discover more on our fresh new product pages.

Two new player widgets: the Artwork and Mini player. Here’s the Artwork player with the Crooked Vultures song New Fang. Sexy, isn’t it – perfect for your album pre-releases.

Easier private sharing with the Secret Link: share a private url via email and IM

Stats-o-rama: completely revamped stats. Be in the know about the who, what, when, which and wheres around your tracks.

Bringing back the original metric of music: total minutes. SoundCloud becomes your tape in the cloud. Erase & rewind, upload & remove as many tracks as you want within your total amount of minutes. Click here to learn about the different minute packs.

Extended privacy options: disable comments, hide stats and make comments private.

Housekeeping: all PRO accounts are now known as Premium accounts. Check out the full lowdown.

Introducing the new Premium account called ‘Lite’, the perfect entry-level account that lets you dive straight into the premium features for only €29.

Cheaper Premium accounts: we just lowered the price of the yearly Solo, Pro and Pro Plus accounts (€79, €250, €500).

Scup and Cloudpost: two new little apps that let you upload straight from your desktop (note: both are beta).

Oh. One more thing: the iPhone app, it’s finally here. Get it in the app store for €0,79 or $0,99.

Cool? We think so too. Pretty much every new feature was developed based on the awesome feedback you have given us in the past months. We hope you like the new stuff we’ve been working on and please don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in the comments.

We’re all going crazy today at the SoundCloud office clicking around our new release–it’s mad slick! So slick in fact that we decided to name it Kim after Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who by the way used SoundCloud heavily for the release of their new album… There are a few major upgrades in this release that we’d love to tell you about.

Where’s my DropBox?

There has been some confusion previously on what the difference was between dropping a track in someone’s “DropBox” and sharing the track to someone privately. So you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve simplified this by effectively making “dropping” and “sharing” the same thing. Using the DropBox to “drop” a track to somebody will now simply share it to that person.

This change has also allowed us to simplify the way you receive tracks too. The most radical difference is that there is actually no DropBox tab anymore. But don’t worry, it’s better now because you’ll get everything in your dashboard instead. Plus you’ll also get two clean lists of incoming tracks: one from people you are following, and one from others (people you are not following). This makes it easier to stay up to date with what tracks have been shared to you-regardless of whether they came through your DropBox or not!

Smarter DropBox

We’ve added one of our most requested features: you can now drop already uploaded tracks into anybody’s DropBox. And you can even drop public tracks. Dropping a public track will notify the recipient in their dashboard and over email just like for private sharing (naturally these notifications can be turned off as well).

Better navigation

We’ve redesigned the site header with smart dropdown menus that make it easy to find all key areas of the site in one click.

Groups

Groups are an entirely new feature on SoundCloud. They can be started by anybody and are a great way to bring people together around a specific theme or project. Want to start a remix contest? Make a group for it and let people send their remixes to that group. You’ll get a DropBox badge for the group that you can put on any page. And you’ll get a great player widget that will show all tracks that have been posted to the group. Groups can also be moderated to give you full control over its contents if required. More info and ideas on groups will follow soon in a blog post dedicated to this great new feature.

So that’s it for perhaps the biggest upgrade ever since the birth of the Cloud. Now go play!

We’ve just launched a new release of SoundCloud that we call Quentin, after that french guy who’s probably most known for this track:

Development of this new version has been going on for a while now, and it’s mostly been about behind-the-scenes stuff, like making the transcoding of audio files really fast even though we have thousands of files uploaded per day, making complex pages really snappy, and completing the upgrade of our servers.
The biggest and most visible changes to the site have already been live for a while (the multi-track uploader, gifts, and volume control), but there are also a number of smaller things that we’ve launched, like the pretty “I’m on SoundCloud” badges, and of course a bunch of bugfixes.

Now that we’re running on a much more scalable setup you can expect more significant feature updates coming in the next few weeks. We’ve got some mighty cool stuff cooking so stay tuned!

UPDATE: Our list of hot tracks is now back as well. Check it out!

We’ve spent the last few days working on a few updates and fixes to the cloud. Good news is they are now online. Bad news is that the site still is slow at times, but we are ON that one. Here are the most important updates just released:

• You can now download tracks without being logged in to SoundCloud. We’ve received many requests for this, so it feels great that it’s now possible.
• You can now add new sets from scratch, simply by going to your sets page and click Create A New Set. You can then upload new tracks to the set directly, or add already uploaded ones.
• Type-ahead search for people in the private sharing contacts picker and contact list is much faster, especially if you have many contacts.
• Some important issues with sets sharing were fixed. Clicking individual tracks in the emails being sent out for private sets will now work. Also, deleting sets works in all situations.

This is just for starters. We’re really happy to be back, taking SoundCloud to the next level in ‘09. And again, we wish you all a great year using it as well!

It’s been little over a month since we opened SoundCloud to the world. We’ve been so happy about the response & specifically about all your great comments & support–THANKS. Today we’re happy to announce our newly launched version of the Cloud, dubbed “Stevie” (after you know who) and share some updates. But first up, a little present:

Almost Half Price X-mas Discount on Yearly PRO Accounts!
We just launched our great value yearly PRO accounts and since holiday times are close we decided to do it with a huge X-mas discount (almost half price!). Grab it now and you get a full year of PRO Light for only €59 (€108), Pro Standard for just €199 (€348) or Pro Max for €399 (€708). We now also accept all major creditcards via PayPal.

Except for major things like the customizable DropBox there are a lot of behind the scenes fixes out in this release, and some nice user interface upgrades as well. Here, for example, is a Dashboard/DropBox user interface detail that some people have been wanting for some time now:

And last but not least, here’s Stevie working the talkbox:

At the moment the brave Clouders are busy celebrating at PICKNICK, dancing to the music of some fantastic artists (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8). It’s been one mad week of looong days and nights of coding, hacking and communicating with lovely SoundCloud members from all over the planet.

And now we’re live. Open. Ready to move your music.

We dedicate this opening release to the one and only Kate. We’ve listened to your music almost every day for a year straight. We’re all running up that hill.

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: