Fed up with trying to send music? SoundCloud it instead.

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

Fed up with trying to send music? SoundCloud it instead.

by Jay Hathaway Jun 6th 2008

A lot of web apps seem to be targeted at problems that nobody actually has. SoundCloud is smarter than that, focusing on a problem we have at least once a week: what's the best way to send a song to a friend? E-mail is a pain, you might not have ready access to an FTP server, and those weird Rapidshare-style upload sites can be more trouble than they're worth.

SoundCloud basically does two things: it sends music, and it receives music. It's the ideal setup for sending around demo copies of that new album you just finished mastering, or sharing the latest hit single (that you would never pirate because you're a law-abiding Internet citizen). There's great control over email notifications for new tracks sent to you and new comments on your songs, and you can play a song right from your SoundCloud account before you download it.

In terms of comments, the SoundCloud system is awesome. You can drop in a note at a specific point in a track -- Viddler users might be familiar with this feature for videos -- and follow your stats to see how many people are listening to your stuff. This just scratches the surface of SoundCloud's features, so be sure to check it out and apply for an invitation if it sounds interesting to you.

Tags: beta, file sharing, FileSharing, mp3, music, SoundCloud, web2.0

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

peter2k said 6:53PM on 6-06-2008

hello, could you please send me an invite? :)

Jay Hathaway said 6:59PM on 6-06-2008

Hi Peter. Sorry, I don't have any! I'll see if SoundCloud would like to give some invites to our readers, though.

TC1 said 12:06PM on 6-07-2008

Some of the features a quite interesting, like being able to put comments on a specific part of a song.
Though this site seems to be directed towards pro music makers.
For amateurs, like me, Soundclick is quite awesome and it is free.
Unlimited uploads (though limited to 128kps and 10Mb file size, for the free accounts), you can choose to have your songs available for download or not so people may download or play the songs thru the online player.

And there's a community a la MySpace.

A great site!

secretlyrobotic said 2:37PM on 6-07-2008

thanks jay for trying to snag some invites... we'd love'em!

Riley said 6:51PM on 6-07-2008

This definitely looks useful...but how fast is it? Does it take forever to upload/share the song?

Malik said 4:46AM on 6-08-2008

Well, I'm sure it shouldn't take that long. Most normal DSL upload speeds are about 40-50 kbps, so an mp3 should upload in less than 5 minutes? maybe 10.

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