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?