Put your sounds in the clouds with SoundCloud
Friday, June 5, 2009 at 16:08
As you might have noticed I use the SoundCloud player on my website. For website owners it’s a nice way of offering streaming audio without having to worry about hosting and the use of bandwith. I’d like to share my experiences with this review.
What is SoundCloud?
As a artist it’s great to have a professional looking way of sharing music with fans, label owners and venues. You can create a set of tracks on SoundCloud to embed it on your MySpace page, a much better sounding solution than the standard MySpace player.
While collaborating with others it’s important to find an effective way of sharing work-in-progress and to have a system for giving feedback on the work. In an educational situation students can upload their files for assessment and send it via their teachers’ dropbox.
For anyone working with sound it is nice to have a secure place to store your files. You can have your important files backed up on the SoundCloud servers and accessible from anywhere, in the highest audio quality.
How does it work?
First you’ll need to create an account. There’s a free plan available which allows you to upload 5 tracks per moth and which has a limited dropbox, in which you can only view the 15 last dropped tracks. There are three Pro accounts available. See the site for pricing and details.
So you have your account, now what? You can start uploading your first track! There are no limitations to file size, and SoundCloud understands MP3 and AAC files as well as Flac and Ogg and uncompressed Wave and AIFF files, at almost all sampling frequencies.
While your audio is uploading you can enter all kinds of information about the file. A name and description, but also things like BPM, key, genre etc. You can choose if you want the track to be public of private and if other people can download it or not. By default SounCloud creates a 128 kbps MP3 file for online streaming purposes. Once you saved your track you can start sharing it with others!
Embedded player
The embeddable SoundCloud player is one of the nicest I have seen. The waveform overview is not exactly accurate, but it gives a good indication of the structure of the tack. Another nice thing is the comments feature. Other SoundCloud users can leave a comment at a specific moment in your track. Comments need to be created on the SoundCloud website but will be displayed in the embedded player if you choose. Here’s a track I used in one of my posts:
There are buttons to share your track directly via Facebook, MySpace, Delicious of Twitter (among others). You can also choose to further customize the player to fit the color scheme of your own site:
Organizing your files
SoundCloud offers a way to group tracks together in a ‘set’. A nice thing about this is that you can have a multi-track embeddable player, so you can, say, have a whole album on your website using the same player.
What I really miss is the ability to tag my tracks and the tracks I received. Especially in a situation where you have to deal with large amounts of files, tagging, and being able to search your dropbox or your own files for a specific tag is a must. I really hope this will be added sometime soon!
The dropbox
Using the SoundCloud dropbox it’s very easy for people to share their own music with you. Click on the link in my dropbox to send me your track. I’ll get a notification about the newly received file. Now I can listen to it and leave my comments directly in the player:
I’m thinking about using this for my teaching activities. Students can upload their assignments to SoundCloud and send me a link via my dropbox, and I can leave a comment with my feedback.
It’s a social network!
SoundCloud allows you to ‘follow’ people in a Twitter-like way. You will find newly uploaded tracks by people you follow on the ‘dashboard’ page. You can organize your contacts in groups called ‘contact lists’. Comments made on tracks are public, but you can also send a personal message.
I haven’t used the social networking functionality a lot yet. There are enough places to connect with other people, like Facebook and Twitter (follow me here), but it’s good to be able to get in touch with the maker of that nice piece of sound you just discovered.
Statistics
SoundCloud offers statistics for each track on your account. This way you can monitor the amount of plays, comments and downloads. You can view all listeners in a list. Here’s an example of the amount of plays for one track:
I like it!
When I first discovered SoundCloud I quite liked it, but I was put off by the high price of the Pro plans. What made me change my mind about this is the ability to upload the highest quality tracks with no file size limits, the dropbox and commenting features, and the player, it just looks so nice!
If you create music yourself and just want to share a track now and then, via MySpace or your own website, the free SoundCloud plan will be fine for you. If you’re an audio pro, one of the Pro accounts will be suitable. The completely unlimited Pro Max account is €599 per year, so that’s what you’ll have to pay if you want to store your whole collection of sounds online. For most users (like me), a Pro light account (€99/yr) will be enough. See the SoundCloud site for details.
Do you use SoundCloud? What do you like about it and what do you think could be improved?
Reader Comments (9)
Hi Hugo
Nice review. One of the things that worries me about websites such as Soundcloud is its longevity.
Believe it or not, websites such as Facebook and MySpace do not make a dime of profit and may eventually go the way of the Dodo (if they can't figure out a way of making money), just like the old mp3.com website did, when it went belly up and took thousands of artists music catalogs with them.
I would be aprehensive before depending completely on a website that hasn't turned the corner as viable business yet.
The good thing is that there are a lot of free sound players for wordpress and other alternatives to Soundcloud available, so we don't have to depend on just one website to deliver content.
Thanks
Hey Hugo,
I do use SoundCloud to share recent tracks I've made. I LOVE seeing the waveform...their embeddable player is very attractive.
If I had an album, or I wanted to share a "set" of music, I would instead use Bandcamp. Its embeddable player for playing an album is the better choice (imho), plus it has visuals that move with the music.
One downside I've noticed with SoundCloud is that it's incredibly difficult to find other people to follow/be followed by. Exploring people is totally unorganized. Their social networking side needs a lot of work.
It's the only player I've found that lets you see waveform and comment on on the timeline. Two very cool features!
@Enigmafon: Thank you. Good point! I like using the sound players for Wordpress as well, but what companies like SoundCloud offer is a better system IMO. But we'll never be shure they will make it in the long run. So I guess there's a bit of gambling involved :) I trust them well enough to store my data on their servers.
I'm tempted to use more and more 'cloud' services, also for other things, like Evernote, which I use for all my notes and capturing ideas on the go with my iPhone. The thing is, a service like Evernote comes with such a great solution, it's hard to ignore it and keep using your own open source wiki or something similar.
@Matt: I've looked at Bandcamp. It's also nice, for an album it could be the right choice because you can show the album art.
One thing I think SoundCloud should improve is the ability to do an advanced search. It would be much better to be able to search for a person with a specific taste, but also to search for tracks with specific metadata (and tags!). I agree.
Hi Hugo
Thank you for your reply.
I agree with you, there are services that surpass what is currently available as open source software, but the good thing about open source is that, features are always being added, and eventually will catch up to the features that are available only on other websites.
If you really think about it, a few years ago we didn't have the option to create our own blog / social website unless we spent weeks coding one from scratch or paid someone to do it for us, but now we can create websites that are just as good and as professional as any website out there, in very little time.
As a matter of fact amazon gives now anyone a way of create data clouds using their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud web service!
the possibilities of what we can do ourselves with some know-how are endless!
Thanks
Absolutely! And I sincerely hope there will be more services like SoundCloud, and at a certain moment even open source systems with the same functionality! It would be great to run my own cloud for a specific purpose!
Thanks for your comment!
Thanks for the write up! This is Dave Haynes from SoundCloud and I will try and answer some points raised in the comments...
@Enigmafon - you shouldn't worry too much about longevity. For the short/medium term we're well backed and focused on making a long lasting platform with value. In the long term of course there is an element of trust. However there are ways that somebody could build a 'backup' feature over our API so you had access to an archive of your masters and data. And it is our goal to keep your audio data secure and stored redundantly.
@Matt - we are looking at building alternative players that suit our different users preferences. Plus again it is more than possible to build custom players over our API (something that we are looking at making even easier than it is now). Search is also something that we'll be focusing more on later this year. It wasn't a priority in the early stages and we actually stripped back slightly on the more 'social network' features initially to really focus on building the core platform. There's still a whole lot more goodness to come and plans are already sketched out for features such as 'advanced search' on both tracks and users.
@Hugo whilst not being strictly 'open source' we do work with a very 'open platform' mentality. And in actual fact we have released the source code to projects built on SoundCloud such as The Cloudplayer and Radioclouds.
Thanks a lot for the clarification, Dave! I can't wait to see what new developments you will come up with.
for me soudcloud is great collaborative tool.
I like the way I can share my tracks privately to fellow musicians or label owners.
I think it's very efficient to make my music evolve.
I'll say it's the best solution I've found to share music in a very pointed way: I was sending my track using yousendit, waiting for an answer, maybe modifying my tracks, sending them back and so on... it's way more practical for feedbacks!
I won't say I use it for social networking like myspace.
but soundcloud have something other sites don't: here you will be able to listen to the last tracks musicians you follow will release, sometime even before they release it! and this is a treasure.
so meet me there ;-) humeka on soundcloud