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:

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.