Big news today you guys!

We just rolled out an update to the site introducing a set of new features that we implemented solely based on your feedback of the past months. We’re really excited about this update and hope you’ll enjoy it too. Let’s get right onto it, shall we:

Spotlight

One of the top requests we’ve received was to support a better way to control which of your tracks or sets should be displayed when people visit your SoundCloud profile. That’s why today, we’re introducing Spotlight, a new tab for your public profile. Spotlight comes with all Premium accounts and lets you select up to five tracks or sets to showcase your best work on your profile. You’re now able to select Spotlight as the default tab so that when people visit your profile, they’ll be able to listen to your finest tracks first. Here’s how it works:

First, go to your public profile and look for the settings icon on the upper right of your profile tabs. Click and it will reveal the selection of tabs you want others to see first when they visit your profile. Click “Add Spotlight tab”:

In the selection window that opens now, you’ll find a list of your tracks and sets. Click to select which track and/or set you want to see included in your Spotlight tab. You can select up to five items – tracks or sets:

Click “Save Spotlight tab” and you’re all set. You now have a new tab on your profile called “Spotlight”:

You on the Web

One of the advanced profile settings is You on the web where you are able to add links to your other presences on the web. Today we’re adding a way to link yourself to your accounts on other popular services on the web.

Access your advanced profile settings where you can add your username or profile urls of other services you use. If you have already connected your Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts in your Extensions, they’ll be automatically listed and you can simply click “Add to profile” to show it on your profile:

Search own Tracks

And last but not least, we’re adding the ability to search for your own tracks within your account. In your Tracks tab you’ll now see a little field on the top of the page that lets you search your own tracks.

In other under-the-hood news, our architecture and ops teams have been busy working on making the stats more robust. We are well aware of the rain clouds you’ve been seeing lately and in the next few days/weeks, we’ll gradually roll out improvements to the stats architecture that will improve the general performance of the site, starting with Premium users.

We hope you like what you see, as always: let us know in the comments.

Choice is good, right? We just love that we can pick our favorite ice cream flavor or favorite color for a new shirt. When it comes to audio creation, it’s even better when your choice creates more choice for others.

Today, SoundCloud is opening up a bit more to allow you to find and share more sounds to use and reuse. With new search and discovery features for Creative Commons tracks, your creations can go much further. More options give you more freedom over your audio content on the web. It helps expose your work and find people to collaborate with that you perhaps wouldn’t normally find. We’re excited about this update and we hope you are too. We say “New features!” you say “Yay!”

Here’s what’s new:

1. Advanced Search

That’s right: finally! You’ve been waiting for this for a while and we’re happy to announce that advanced search options are now available. You’re now able to search for things like genre, tags, a specific label, track type and much more. Check the screenshot below for the different options and try it out for yourself in the search feature.

2. Browse by tag

Also new: clicking the tag on a player will lead you to a new Explore page that lets you discover other tracks by tags where you can also choose to see the latest tracks added or sorted by popularity. A tagcloud on the right of the page lets you jump straight into a different genre. (Pro tip: choose your genre tags wisely, young Jedis, this will provide the best search results for everyone).

3. Creative Commons integration

You’ve probably also noticed another addition in the advanced search options: search for tracks released under a Creative Commons license. Creative what?! Glad you’re asking! Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that has released a set of free and voluntary copyright licenses. With Creative Commons licenses, creators have the freedom to choose how their work can be used, shared and re-used. There are six different licenses that provide users with different levels. Browsing audio released under CC just became a whole lot easier with a dedicated page we just deployed to the site. Check it out: http://soundcloud.com/creativecommons

Not only can you search for tracks released under CC licenses but we also gave the SoundCloud player a little face-lift. It now displays the type of CC license in the top right corner of the player:

Update: Creative Commons just updated their blog with some notes about the integration including an interview with our own Parker Higgins, who has been a driving force getting the integration done: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23018

By the way: third-party application developers now too can access tags and creative commons content via the API so you get the same experience when using your favorite apps.

Get involved! We’d love to see you contribute!

Sounds of CCentury is a group on SoundCloud collecting the coolest CC-licensed and No Rights Reserved historic audio. We’ve started it out with a few public domain tracks, but if you run an archive, have access to other interesting public domain tracks, or just happened to have a field recorder handy when something amazing happened, please contribute to this collection. If you can’t contribute, there’s already some incredible stuff to listen to, and there will be more added in the next days and weeks. Check out the first contributions below and submit yours here: http://soundcloud.com/groups/sounds-of-ccentury

Creative Commons Mashup Contest: get your mashup machines rollin’ for a change to win a yearly SoundCloud Pro account (worth 250 Euro) in this little competition we just pushed using SoundCloud-Remix, the remix app we’ve posted about last week. Get the full details right here.

Oh and one more thing: Creative Commons also joined SoundCloud with an official account so if you fancy checking them out, follow at will.

Keep an eye out in the next couple of days, as we’ll be featuring quite some exciting SoundCloud members working with audio licensed under Creative Commons. This will happen right here on the blog, starting tomorrow.

F-R-E-S-H, fresh, fresh. fresh, yo that’s fresh! We just finished another update of the site with some nifty new features! Many thanks to all the cloud testers for helping us out, keep sending us your excellent feedback. This is how happy we get when you send us all the good feedback!

Here’s a rundown of some additions to the SC platform:

• New basic “search” feature for users and tracks: located at the bottom of the page, in the “crowds” and “music” segments, this function will help you find your favorite artists and tracks.
• New audio formats supported: now you can upload up to 24bit/192 Khz uncompressed, as well as flac, ogg/vorbis and more. And the uploader is much smoother too!
• New “favorite” notification: you’ll get info in your dashboard when somebody favorites your track.
• New player feature: now you can jump directly to a certain point in the track by simply typing in a time value (underneath the play button, in the field that shows the current length of the track). Kind of like a sequencer.

We also had a major bug-squashing session and now we have more (binary) blood on our hands than Shackleton! But the result is that the site currently runs much smoother (better pagination, correct “discogs” input field, etc…), so there’s more to enjoy for all the clouders…

Show us your love by becoming our friend at myspace ! And if you can’t get enough of social networks (like we do), you should join our group and support our product at Facebook!

The SoundCloud team hopes that you’ll enjoy your weekend and the new site!