Backstage Blog

• Announcements
• API

As well as adding new features and updates, we review existing features to see if they’re still beneficial to the community.

As we dug into the best ways for curators to connect with artists and fans, we found that Groups aren’t working as well as reposts and curated playlists.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to phase out Groups on Monday, August 22nd to make room for future updates.

From this date, all Groups-related GET requests will no longer return results, and PUT requests will not persist…

• Microservices
• Finagle
• Architecture

Since we started breaking our monolith and introduced a microservices architecture we rely a lot on synchronous request-response style communication. In this blog post we’ll go over our current status and some of the lessons we learned.

• Announcements
• Open Source
• Monitoring
• Go

On Monday this week, the Prometheus authors have released version 1.0.0 of the central component of the Prometheus monitoring and alerting system, the Prometheus server. (Other components will follow suit over the next months.) This is a major milestone for the project. Read more about it on the Prometheus blog, and check out the announcement of the CNCF, which has recently accepted Prometheus as a hosted project.

• Announcements
• Recommendation System
• Machine Learning

Over the last 100 years we have dialed into radio stations at home, on the road, or in the office to access a curated mix of top hits delivered to us by our favorite DJ. With more and more of our daily activities taking place online, we find our source of music now comes from a mix of our mobile phones, our desktop computers and the radio - and is available to us whenever we need it. The amount of music available today is endless. The music scene has never been so vibrant. A proliferation of production tools at low cost and the ease at which an artist can share their sounds, gives everyone the opportunity to share their work at any time, with only a few clicks.

Keeping this in mind, we set out to determine: How can we bring a radio like experience to SoundCloud that would enable you to tune-in and lean back?

• Announcements
• Recommendation System
• Machine Learning
• Data Science

With more than 125 million tracks from over 12 million creators heard each month on our platform, SoundCloud is uniquely positioned to offer listeners a full spectrum of music discovery.

Classic hits, the latest releases, gems from underground talent and the best of what’s up-and-coming – all in one place.

How can you make great content discoverable and available at ease? How can you create a unique experience for every single user?

• Open Source
• Hadoop
• Big Data
• Crunch

With Java 8 now in the mainstream, Scala and Clojure are no longer the only choices to develop readable, functional code for big data technology on the JVM. In this post we see how SoundCloud is leveraging Apache Crunch and the new Crunch Lambda module to do the high-volume data processing tasks which are essential at early stages in our batch data pipeline efficiently, robustly and simply in Java 8.

• Announcements
• API

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…

• Android
• Mobile

Last week, we open-sourced LightCycle, an Android library that helps break logic out of Activity and Fragment classes into small, self-contained components called LightCycles.

Components that typically need to be aware of Activity and Fragment lifecycle events include presenters, UI tracking code, input processors and more. We’ve been using LightCycle extensively in the SoundCloud Music & Audio and SoundCloud Pulse apps over the last year.

• Android
• Mobile

In part one we described how running into Android’s method limit may leave you unable to build, and offered strategies you can employ to make your app fit into a single DEX file. In this part we share an alternative option: using multiple DEX files.

• 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…