Backstage Blog

• Announcements
• API

The SoundCloud API will be dropping support for Extensible Markup Language (XML) responses. XML will be phased out on the following schedule:

1. XML is currently the default response format for requests without an explicit format specified in the path (e.g. /tracks) or Accept header. This default will be changed to JSON on December 1, 2014.
2. Explicit requests for XML — specified either in the path (e.g. /tracks.xml) or an Accept: application/xml header — will continue to be supported until December 15, 2014. After that point, only JSON responses will be supported.
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• Announcements
• Go
• Open Source

Let’s talk about the stream.

The SoundCloud stream represents stuff that’s relevant to you primarily via your social graph, arranged in time order, newest-first. The atom of that data model, an event, is a simple enough thing.

• Timestamp
• User who did the thing
• Identifier of the thing that was done

For example,

• At 2014-04-01T13:14:15.034Z,
• a-trak
• Reposted track skrillex/duck-sauce-nrg-skrillex-kill

If you followed A-Trak, you’d want to see that repost event in your stream. Easy. The difficult…

• Announcements
• JavaScript
• SDKs

SoundCloud is pleased to introduce a new major version of the SoundCloud JavaScript SDK. In version 2, we’ve rewritten much of the internal code, resulting in better performance for your JavaScript applications and support for more streaming standards, such as HTTP Live Streaming.

You can test the new version by pointing your JavaScript applications to https://connect.soundcloud.com/sdk-2.0.0.js.

We’ve also created a guide to help you upgrade from version 1 to version 2.

JavaScript SDK version…

• Announcements

We’ve taken some time to bring all our developer resources together into a single site. In doing so, we’ve reorganized the layout to make things easier to find and also given the site a fresh new look.

We hope you like it!

If you have any feedback about the new design, follow @SoundCloudDev on Twitter and let us know.

• Announcements
• Security

On Monday, April 7th, 2014, a major security vulnerability in OpenSSL was made public. The vulnerability was filed as CVE-2014-0160 and later dubbed “Heartbleed”, because the bug lies within OpenSSL’s heartbeat extension, which is used for keepalive monitoring. As a result of the bug, process memory can be read out remotely by an attacker—potentially including certificates, keys, credentials, tokens, or other sensitive data processed by the server.

OpenSSL works as a cryptographic library that allows for authenticity and confidentiality across the entire Internet. Because the reported Heartbleed bug affects a vast number of internet services using OpenSSL to secure their services (such as HTTPS, SMTP, IMAPS, and POP3), a patched OpenSSL version was released…

• Announcements

The /tracks endpoint has traditionally accepted an order parameter for ordering results by either creation date or ‘hotness’. The method for calculating a tracks ‘hotness’ has never been clearly explained, but generally speaking is based on the number of likes and listens a track receives.

Recently we started to experience problems with the query that returns tracks ordered by hotness. In the past weeks, these problems started to effect and even cause outages for API users.

We have decided that the best way forward is to remove this parameter. Starting soon, GET requests to the /tracks endpoint will ignore the order…

• Announcements

We’re making some changes to how we manage our App Gallery and wanted to take some time to explain them to you, our developer community.

The App Gallery is where we highlight interesting and useful SoundCloud powered apps and services for our users. As our developer community continues to grow, it’s even more important that we keep a high bar for apps found in App Gallery. Having a high standard protects the value of being featured in App Gallery for all of our developers while giving our users…

• Announcements
• SDKs

Today we’re featuring a guest post from our friends at Retronyms. They’ve built some amazing community features into their app Tabletop using the SoundCloud API and have open sourced their CloudSeeder Devkit. This post was written for us by David Shu. David is a software engineer at the Retronyms and has worked on a number of iOS apps, including Tabletop and Dokobots. He currently resides in San Francisco, CA.

We recently built a SoundCloud-powered community into our app Tabletop, a modular audio environment for the iPad, using the CocoaSoundCloudAPI. The project, CloudSeeder, lets users browse, stream, favorite, and comment on Tabletop tracks without ever leaving the app.

As developers, we discovered tons of talented users in our Tabletop community. At the same time, our users found inspiration from each other and a new showcase for their creations. To share in the excitement of community creation with all developers, today we’re releasing the CloudSeeder Devkit as open source on Google Code.

• Announcements
• Events
• Hacks

A few weeks ago, I attended News Hack Day in San Francisco. News Hack Days are events that bring together journalists, developers and designers for multi day creative coding and brainstorming sessions.

I really like the idea of hack days that bring together people from different backgrounds. After chatting with a few journalists, it became obvious to me that recording interviews on the phone is a real pain. I saw this as an opportunity to build a fun app that would make this easier for people.

• Announcements
• SDKs

There are many approaches to building libraries that wrap HTTP APIs. For many of our officially supported SDKs we chose to build light wrappers around HTTP client libraries with a few added features to make it easier to work with the SoundCloud API. This approach has a few benefits. It guarantees a certain consistency and is relatively easy to maintain. It’s also fairly future proof. Changes in the HTTP API do not typically require updates to client libraries.

Sometimes however, you might be looking for something a bit more feature-full, or with more abstraction from our HTTP API. That’s why I was really happy to see that the great folks at SocialFolders built an alternative SoundCloud Ruby gem and released it to the public. You can check out their blog post about it or go straight to the source on GitHub.