Backstage Blog

• Guides

UPDATE: Check out our guides on Authentication and Sharing Sounds for the most recent information.

If you build an app or web service that generates any type of sound, it’s easy to connect it to SoundCloud and enable your users to share their creations across the web. Allowing users to share what they create to their existing social networks and the SoundCloud community brings great value in a variety of use cases. If you have an app for beat making, you can let your users post their creations to a dedicated group on SoundCloud. For aspiring music makers, it’s valuable and fun to get feedback from friends on Facebook. And for someone recording an interview with their phone, it’s super handy to be able to post the audio directly to a blog. In addition, a sharing feature is obviously practical for sending files to collaborators or moving audio between devices.

• Announcements

We are happy to introduce you to our new developer portal developers.soundcloud.com. Here we are bundling up all the SoundCloud platform and developer related products and resources. It will give you the best starting point to dig into our API and all things related! Let us know what you think about it!

This “Puzzle to Unlock” concept came to me straight from Manchester Orchestra’s wonderful label/management team, and we were able to pull it together very quickly with SoundCloud, jQuery, and SoundManager2.

The band wanted to build a bit of excitement around the premiere of their new single “Simple Math.” So we developed a way to tease the song with dialogue from the artist and actual clips of audio released as “pieces” to a puzzle that will unlock both the album cover and track. Cool, right?

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• 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…

• Guides
• SDKs

So you are familiar with the SoundCloud API Wrapper and want to use it to share the sounds you upload? And you want to use the existing connections on SoundCloud or make new ones? Awesome. Here’s how to do it.

Being both a mediocre biz dev guy and a nerd means I get to post on the Developer blog as well as our Company blog, and today I’d like to talk to you about Git.

What is Git?

Git is a free & open source, version control system that when used in conjunction with social coding websites such as GitHub can greatly improve your efficiency for both small and large projects by keeping track of changes, collaborators, and more. You’ll be wondering how you ever lived without it.

I’ve had to teach myself…

• Events
• Hacks

Team SoundCloud hacking at Music Hack Day Barcelona

Last weekend a team of SoundCloud attended Music Hack Day Barcelona. This blog post is going to talk about what a Music Hack Day is and how we experienced the one in Barcelona.

At a Music Hack Day people from around the world gather to spend 24 hours hacking on music and tech. Projects can range from connecting APIs and creating new webapps to building new instruments or mashup audio. The first Music Hack Day happened in London in July 2009 and since then already Music Hack Days took place around the world in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, Stockholm and San Francisco…

A few days ago a small team of SoundCloud developers (@goldjunge, @jberkel, @purzelrakete and @sohm) participated in the first node.js knockout competition. Aptly named “Team SoundCloud”, we set out to explore the current state of server side Javascript using node.js and the real-time web.

(For those unfamliar with Node.js, head over to http://nodejs.org/ or the project wiki at https://github.com/ry/node/wiki for an introduction.)

The node.js Knockout is a competition inspired by the popular Rails Rumble. The rules are simple: Teams of up to 4 people have 48 hours to build a web app that is awesome enough to woo the judges and results in as many votes from the audience as possible. To level the playing field, each team was required to deploy their application to a dedicated hosting environment provided by either heroku.com or joyent.com…

• 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…

Our very cool devs Matas and Hannes.

With over 15 developers working on the SoundCloud site nowadays, we’re pumping out a steady stream of new features and scalable web application code. It’s been a long journey building up such a great team, with lots of lessons learned along the way. We’re really thankful for the fact that the web startup community is so open about sharing technical knowledge–this has been super-helpful for us sofar. And we’re still regularly checking blogs of peer companies…