Backstage Blog

• Announcements
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We previously introduced new playlist representations. The compact representation returns only the playlist itself without any of the tracks. For most users, this is preferable – the compact representation significantly reduces the size of the JSON payload for large playlists and provides faster API response times.

Beginning July 15, 2016, all queries using the q parameter will only return this compact representation for playlists. Other playlist representations will no longer be available when using the q…

• Announcements
• API
• JavaScript
• SDKs

We are happy to announce version 3.0.0 of our SoundCloud JavaScript SDK.

The new SDK improves stream security and content uploading functionality, and modernizes the technology stack.

Version 3 of the SoundCloud JavaScript SDK is a major update and is not backwards compatible. That said, the changes that you need to make your web app work with the new SDK are easy to implement. Please refer to Migrating to JavaScript SDK 3.0.0 to upgrade.

ECMAScript 2015 and CommonJS

The original version of the…

• Announcements
• API

At SoundCloud, we’re building an ecosystem where creativity thrives. Developers are an important part of that ecosystem. We’re continually inspired by how you use the SoundCloud API to support creators and listeners in innovative ways.

But as the ecosystem has grown, we’re dealing with an increasing number of applications that abuse creator content by violating our developer Terms of Use. To help control this type of behaviour, we’re introducing a daily rate limit on API play requests.

Beginning…

• Announcements
• API

Requests for playlists have always included the full track objects contained within. This representation may be convenient for playlists with ten or twenty tracks but can cause problems for playlists that contain hundreds or thousands of tracks. Requesting such large playlists could result in requests that take a long time to respond and that eventually timeout.

Today, we introduce two new representations for the /playlists resource: compact and id.

If you add representation=compact to a playlist request, the request will return only…

• Announcements
• API

In October 2014, Apple announced that all submissions to the App Store must include 64-bit support by June 1, 2015. The SoundCloud API for Cocoa contains 32-bit dependencies and will not be updated, because it has been discontinued. Anyone using the SoundCloud API for Cocoa will need to will need to migrate away from it if they wish to update their app after June 1.

To ease this transition we have built a sample app that demonstrates how to authorize a user via OAuth using only built-in…

• Announcements
• API

The SoundCloud API will be dropping support for offset-based pagination on March 2, 2015, in favor of linked partitioning.

To page through a JSON response, pass the linked_partitioning=1 parameter along with your request and it will return a collection, along with a next_href property if there are additional results. To fetch the next page of results, simply follow that URI. If the response does not contain a next_href property, you have reached the end of the results.

You can read more about linked partitioning in the Pagination section of our HTTP API Guide…

• 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.
…

• API
• Architecture
• Open Source

This is a story of how we adapted our architecture over time to accomodate growth.

Scaling is a luxury problem and surprisingly has more to do with organization than implementation. For each change we addressed the next order of magnitude of users we needed to support, starting in the thousands and now we’re designing for the hundreds of millions.  We identify our bottlenecks and addressed them as simply as possible by introducing clear integration points in our infrastructure to divide and…

• API

From today on, we advise developers to use OAuth 2 as preferred way of API authentication. Our implementation of the Draft 10 OAuth 2 specification is in production for several months months now and we made good experiences with it. Thus we move it from beta to official recommendation.

OAuth 2 makes it easier for developers to implement authentication for accessing private resources. The feedback we got from external app developers and our in-house API users has been very positive. This is what Ullrich, one of the developers of the SoundCloud iPhone app and Cocoa wrapper, has to say about…

• API
• JavaScript

If you’re a JavaScript head, we’ve got something for you. SoundCloud now supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing, using XMLHttpRequest. Or, to put it another way: no more implausible JSON-P hacks.

Some background on CORS can be found here and here.  Our implementation is super-simple:  we let you do GET requests, for our public resources. Full documentation of the feature is on our wiki, but here’s a bit of code to get you started:

var invocation = new XMLHttpRequest();
// Internet Explorer uses a propritary object called XDomainRequest
var url = 'https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks';
function callOtherDomain() {
    if (invocation) {
        invocation.open('GET', url, true);
        invocation.onreadystatechange = handler;
        invocation.send();
    }
}

As we’re just setting headers, the implementation was done as an…