Today we’re celebrating the awesome fact that there are now more than 100 apps connected to SoundCloud. All apps are on display in our newly updated App Gallery in order to make it easier for you to find the tools and services that will take your SoundCloud experience to the next level.

The New App Gallery:

Whether you’re a music professional or just a casual creator you’ll to find something interesting in the Gallery.  Take a look around to find a wide range of apps for mobile, desktop and the web.

For us, the connected apps are a vital part of the SoundCloud. By letting third-party apps connect, we can focus on building a kick-ass audio sharing platform. At the same time, app makers can help us improve by letting you upload your tracks directly from apps, create nice looking artist pages, distribute your tracks to iTunes, and a lot more.

The latest addition to the list of apps is the brand new iMS-20 from our Japanese friends at Korg. The app is really cool, not only because it sports a great emulation of the classic MS-20 synth, but also because you can share and collaborate on projects right in the app.

And here’s a little video of that SoundCloud integration in action:

As you know, we love audio creators, but we also love developers! Therefore, we will keep on working our hardest to not only make SoundCloud an awesome place for sound sharing, but also an open and easily accessible platform for developers.

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!