The Christmas Release

Ho Ho Ho dearest people of the Cloud!

We’re wrapping up a fantastic 2009 with a final release before taking a few days off to rest with our families and re-fuel before kicking off 2010 in proper style.

Before we move onto what’s new in our Christmas Release, here’s a special Christmas discount for all our blog readers: If you use the code HoHoHo9 when signing up for a Premium account before Christmas Day, you’ll get 10% off the regular yearly price or save 20% for three months on any monthly subscription!

People Finder

We’ve added a really useful tool that will come in handy to find contacts you have on other platforms and networks. It will help you to check if your friends on services like Gmail, MySpace, Twitter or Facebook are already on SoundCloud and if they’re not, make it easy to invite them to follow you and thus stay updated about everything you do do on SoundCloud. Check it out!

Abbey Road & SoundCloud, a love affair

We’re really excited to announce a partnership with Abbey Road, the legendary studio known for the (post-) production of epic albums with artists like Pink Floyd, Foo Fighers, the Beatles, Green Day, Oasis, and Radiohead. If you want to have your songs mastered by some of the best engineers in the industry, it is now possible to import your tracks to Abbey Road Online Mastering directly from your SoundCloud account. Plus, Abbey Road is offering a 20 % discount to all SoundCloud users. Read more.

App Gallery & Developer Pages

We’re strong believers in the power of open API’s – proof for this are the many different applications that have been built on top of the robust SoundCloud API. We think it’s time to pay respect to the many developers that – in their free time – have built fantastic apps and are thereby adding a lot of value to the SoundCloud experience. Check out all recent and future applications in the new App Gallery we’re launching today. Also, if you are a developer yourself and have a kick-ass idea you’d like to execute on top of our API, the new developer resources are the perfect starting point to get the coding going. Right this way.

Premium Goodies

We’ve teamed up with some of our friends to offer all Premium users some sweet special offers and discounts. If you have a Premium account, log in and have a look at the new Premium Goodies page! Great companies like Native Instruments, Ableton, MOO.com, Juno Download, YouLicense or The Bizmo are already on board.

Updated iPhone app

This is a short ‘n sweet one: grab the update of our iPhone app in the app store and get access to the tracks you’ve favorited on SoundCloud.

Secret Widget

Here’s a nice one for all Pro and Pro Plus users: after the Secret Link it’s now time for the Secret Widget that we’re adding based on the feedback we’ve received from labels and digital PR agencies after the release of Taylor. From now on, if you want to invite a limited group of listeners to a password-protected site, you’ll be able to have your SoundCloud tracks embedded and streamable right there.

To get it, simply generate a Secret Link for your track and set and click ‘Share’ to grab the embed code.

Site performance

We promised we’d keep you updated about the progress of the overall site performance. The first batch of improvements have started to kick in. Not only have we upgraded the hardware but we’ve also been working hard on things that are mostly ‘invisible’ to you but make the overall experience better.

These include much snappier adding/removal of contacts in contact lists and your private sharing panel, an ongoing optimization of the upload and audio transcoding process and balancing and optimizing the database load. We don’t want to go too technical on you but would like you to know we’re moving quickly with the promised improvements.

Also, we’ve set up a Status blog over at our friends from Tumblr where we will post tech-updates as they come in. Feel free to follow!

Finally…

We want to thank you for having been part of SoundCloud this past year and wish you a Merry Christmas with your loved ones and a kicking new year 2010. See/hear you again in 2010!

Thank you so much!