FiRe, the popular iPhone field recorder app by our friends at Audiofile Engineering has been updated to version 1.3.0.

The new version adds features like input processing effects powered by iZotope, expanded metadata support, file encoding, and more. The SoundCloud integration has also been polished to make it even smoother to export your iPhone recordings to the cloud.

Check out all the new features and get FiRe 1.3.0 in the App Store.

Record anywhere and upload to SoundCloud straight from the app.

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’re experiencing some unexpected downtime on soundcloud.com since around 8am CET this morning. This has not been planned downtime, and so it’s indeed very unfortunate. The error happened as we were making final preparations for the move to a new and much more powerful datacenter in London. We hope that it will be resolved by 5pm today at the latest. No data has been lost.

Over the past weeks our development team has been working hard on making soundcloud faster. A big part of that project has been preparing for the move to a new datacenter. The team has done a very good job on optimizing the site, but the big speed bottleneck has proven to be in the current server setup.

By 6pm today this should all change and SoundCloud will be back up again, faster than it ever was.

Sincerely,
The SoundCloud Team

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!

Here we are on christmas eve sitting and trying to relax, spend time with our families and not think about the Cloud and the cool stuff we’re working on at the moment. I’d like to take the opportunity here and paraphrase a website we deeply respect:

The SoundCloud team never sleeps, it only waits.

…for the site update which is due in the next few days!

Another week, another 100 users! Looks like we’re going to pass the 800 mark by the time you read this…The last 2 weeks have been quite crazy, with people from various parts of the world signing in (from the States to China) and also a heavy dose of some of the best house producers around (Franck Roger, Rocco, The Pasta Boys…)! We have to thank mostly our Italian friends at Degoba Records for kick-starting a whole snow-balling movement with the House scene’s involvement in SC. Grazie Mille!

Speaking of SoundCloud (what else?), we’re cooking up a lot of nice features for 2008: first of all is the universally-requested “Search user” function. Yes, it’s finally coming! Just hold on a few more weeks…

A lot of you have also asked for a possibility that would enable the user to change the order of the tracks appearing on his profile: our top-notch programmers are working on a new feature called “sets” which will enable users to group their tracks (like albums) and thus reordering tracks how they’d like to..

“Sets” will also allow you to group your favourite music from other artists in SoundCloud and let your friends know what you like at the moment. Kinda like a DJ set or like one of those old mixtapes you used to do in School for your classmates (”Henri’s Straight From Brooklyn Selection” or something)…

Anyway, more news coming up soon so in the meantime, keep sending your remarks, wishes, critics, ideas and tips to feedback@soundcloud.com!