Backstage Blog

• 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.

• Go
• Open Source

SoundCloud is a polyglot company, and while we’ve always operated with Ruby on Rails at the top of our stack, we’ve got quite a wide variety of languages represented in our backend. I’d like to describe a bit about how—and why—we use Go, an open-source language that recently hit version 1.

It’s in our company DNA that our engineers are generalists, rather than specialists. We hope that everyone will be at least conversant about every part of our infrastructure. Even more, we encourage engineers…

• 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.

• Events
• Hacks

SoundCloud loves hack days. Our latest hack day adventure brought us to Music Hack Day in Barcelona and we thought we’d share a bit of the great experience we had there.

Photo by Thomas Bonte

• Announcements

I’ve worked at SoundCloud for over two years now, and if there’s one thing I do a lot, it’s color waveforms. Tons of them. And, I’ve done it several different ways. Today, Johannes and I are pumped to announce a new JavaScript library called Waveform.js that will assist you in your coloring efforts. But first, let’s take some time to look back and learn from past techniques.

• Announcements

Smashing Pumpkins are using a BETA of the next version of Premiere to debut their new record “Oceania.” Here’s what’s new about the app.

• JavaScript

This article is also available in:

• Serbo-Croatian: Pravljenje novog SoundCloud
• Armenian: SoundCloud (ձայնամպ) ծրագրավորողների համար

The front-end team at SoundCloud has been building upon our experiences with the HTML5 widget to make the recently-released Next SoundCloud beta as solid as possible. Part of any learning also includes sharing your experiences, so here we outline the front-end architecture of the new site.

Building a single-page application

One of the core features of Next SoundCloud is continuous playback, which allows users to start listening to a sound and continue exploring without ever breaking the experience. Since this really encourages lots of navigation around the site, we also wanted to make that as fast and smooth as possible. These two factors were enough in themselves for us to decide to build Next as a single-page Javascript application. Data is drawn from our public API…

• Events

On Saturday, I joined over a hundred other hackers at HackTO. This has become a regular event in the Toronto tech scene, thanks to excellent organizing by Leila Boujnane and Corey Reid. SoundCloud joined several other API providers, including Atomic Reach, Context.IO, FreshBooks, Shopify, TinEye, Twilio, Trendspottr, WordPress and YellowAPI.

The idea behind the event is simple: find a team (or go solo) and build an app using one or more of the APIs presented by sponsors. All apps have to be demoable by 5pm at which time you pitch to the judges who select the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners.

• Announcements
• Hacks

In the last weeks we got pretty excited about the idea of using timed comments to create and script rich media experiences. Imagine being able to trigger all kinds of visualizations & interactions for a timed comment while playing a track.