Backstage Blog

• 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

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…

• 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.

• 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…

With excitement building for the Velocity Conference in Berlin, we are happy to announce a pre-event meet up on Monday, November 7 at the Betahaus in Berlin. The event will be a great opportunity for visitors of the Velocity conference to beat the jet lag with a day of networking and relaxed sessions and talks. To get everyone in the Berlin-state-of-mind, the evening will be capped with a party.

Berlin has quickly established itself as one of Europe’s main technology hubs. There are a lot of web companies in Berlin which are part of a constantly growing and vibrant local web community. The location for the BoF, Betahaus…

• Announcements
• SDKs

Not long ago we released a sharing kit for Android. Today, we’re equally excited to announce a similar sharing kit for iOS.

With the sharing kit, you can add SoundCloud sharing to your iPhone and iPad apps with only a few lines of code. We provide everything you need to let your users share their sounds to SoundCloud, including authentication, UI and connections to other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

We just signed the corporate contributor license agreement (CCLA). SoundCloud always was big on open source – we nearly exclusively use open source software in our company and use a lot of Apache projects like Hadoop, Solr, Flume, Zookeeper and Cassandra on our large scale production site.

As SoundCloud is using a lot of Apache projects and started to contribute to project we decided to sign the CCLA and enable all our developers to contribute to Apache projects even during work time if that…

When we started the Mobile project early 2011, unit testing JavaScript was one of the goals to tackle on the technical side. The history of custom JavaScript code at SoundCloud up until then rarely included unit tests, so providing references and the necessary ground research was important for both the project at hand as well as for other projects at SoundCloud.

This articles aims to provide an overview of the tools we use, what worked well and what we need to improve.

Tools

When we started the Mobile project, there were just two developers on the team, Matas and Jörn. With Jörn already maintaining and supporting QUnit for three years, this particular choice was an easy one. If you haven’t yet heard of it: Among available unit testing frameworks, QUnit is among the most popular ones. There’s a comprehensive tutorial over at ScriptJunkie…

• Announcements
• SDKs
• Android

Are you an Android developer and want to integrate SoundCloud in your own app? With the new Android Sharing Kit this has become very easy.