Backstage Blog

• Announcements

This is not The Greatest Website in the World, no. This is just a tribute.

I was approached by Tenacious D a week ago with an incredible quest: raising a phallus shaped phoenix onto the internet (oh and the first clip of audio from their new record.) How could I raise this majestic beast with the power of SoundCloud’s legendary API? The answer was simple: Have the sound itself rize the phoenix from its ashes.

• Announcements

Today we’ve added support for our new HTML5 widget to the oEmbed endpoint.

Aside from a brand new user interface with lots of improvements, the HTML5 widget doesn’t require Adobe Flash anymore. That means the widget will load much faster and finally work well on most mobile platforms, including Android & iOS.

And we won’t stop here. We’ll continue to improve the new widget in the coming months.

• Events
• Hacks

Last month we attended Music Hack Day London 2011. A special one, Music Hack Day was born in London 3 years ago and we were happy to attend a hack day again in it’s homeland.

For those who do not know of Music Hack Day, it’s a great weekend-long event aimed at music and sound hackers. Anyone can attend the event for free, and their goal is to conceptualize and develop innovative hacks of either software or hardware.

• Hacks
• Open Source

At SoundCloud we like to invent new ideas. But we’re not adverse to implementing really great tried and tested ideas like the 20% time concept made famous by Google.

We’re calling it Hacker Time. We’re still very much in start-up mode so we’re keen to nurture the spirit of hacking. We’ve been testing out Hacker Time for a few weeks now and we’re excited about its potential, from industry-changing initiatives like “Are we playing yet” to unusual passion projects like the “Owl Octave”.

Why we’re…

• JavaScript

Proper and effective error tracking is a common issue for front-end JavaScript code compared to back-end environments.

We felt this pain as well and experimented with different solutions over the past months on the SoundCloud Mobile site.

Analytics

The first approach we had was to track errors with Google Analytics. Their library permits to fire custom events and whenever an ajax error would occur, we would log it.

The biggest benefit of this tool is to monitor the stability of the site and its…

• Announcements

OmniAuth is a great little Rack library that standardizes multi-provider authentication for web applications. As OmniAuth says, “it was created to be powerful, flexible, and do as little as possible.” I use it constantly on hacks that mash up multiple API providers.

You can now add SoundCloud to the growing list of strategies OmniAuth 1.0 supports.

• Announcements

Competitions are a great way to get your fans involved around a particular theme or release. They encourage original content creation and tend to be extremely viral due to the high level of self-promotion involved with participating.

The infrastructure you choose to throw these contests on should be accessible from any device while also providing a nice aesthetic backdrop to apply your branding. Users should be able to submit, vote, and comment no matter where they’re coming from: Web, iPhone, Facebook Tab, etc.

Today we’re putting forth an open-source app called Competition which we think is a great solution to the problem.

• Announcements

Today we’re excited to announce a big update to our JavaScript SDK. Aside from improving the existing functionality like authentication, API read requests and oEmbed, we’ve added some sweet new features:

• API write support:

  Create comments, follow users, like sounds and update user profiles

• Audio Streaming:

  Build your own player powered by SoundCloud

• Audio recording and uploading:

  Let your users record and upload sounds to SoundCloud from your website.

All of these features can be added…

• Events
• Hacks

Last weekend was another successful Music Hack Day Boston jam-packed with cool hacks, and hackers alike. We are always excited to get involved, meet new and interesting people, and of course hack!

• HTML5
• Open Source

We at SoundCloud want to build the best sound player for the web, and we want to do that using the Open Web standards. While working on the native audio features on our mobile site and new widgets, or even as an experiment on the main site, we have discovered that the HTML5 Audio standard is not equally well implemented across all modern browsers and some decisions can be made that would benefit the web audio users and web developers alike. Soundcloud launches the “Are We Playing Yet?” project…