You were brave & patient, we released it yesterday:

The official SoundCloud iPhone app. Boom!

Being able to listen to and send your tracks from an iPhone app has been one of the things you requested most so we’re really excited that it’s finally here – and we hope you are too. We’ve teamed up with the fantastic iPhone app developing duo Gernot & Ullrich (who also share an office with us) to release Version 1.0 of the app. Here’s what it will let you do:

• Browse and listen to your own tracks or the tracks sent directly to you and your DropBox
• Favorite tracks
• Send tracks via email addresses from your local address book

So whenever you’re on the road or at gigs, meeting producers or folks interested in your tracks, the app allows you to send them your tracks straight from where you are. Commuting to and from work? Check out the latest tracks sent to you from the people you follow and from others and favorite them right in the app. Cool? We think so too.

The app comes for €0,79 or $0,99 and you will be directed to the app store by clicking this link. Go ahead and test it, rate it and leave feedback in the app store.  Also please come back here and post your feedback in the comments. We can’t wait to hear what you think, let us know and help shaping Version 2.0 of the app.

As I type this, the app currently ranks #2 in Ireland, #7 in Germany, #8 in the UK, #4 in The Netherlands, #6 in Sweden and #27 in the US (all in the category paid music apps). Let’s push it to the top so tweet it, blog it, spread the word.

Thanks so much!

… we just want to say that SoundCloud just pushed the best release of all time. The best release of all time!

Friends of the Cloud, we’re happy to announce the release of Taylor, named after Taylor Swift, who had a fun encounter with *the* Kanye. This was big news for both Taylor and Kanye and it’s major news for SoundCloud as it’s our biggest update ever.

We’ll be posting an ongoing series of blog posts with details about each new feature in the next few days and here’s a quick overview of what’s happening today. Click the links below to discover more on our fresh new product pages.

Two new player widgets: the Artwork and Mini player. Here’s the Artwork player with the Crooked Vultures song New Fang. Sexy, isn’t it – perfect for your album pre-releases.

Easier private sharing with the Secret Link: share a private url via email and IM

Stats-o-rama: completely revamped stats. Be in the know about the who, what, when, which and wheres around your tracks.

Bringing back the original metric of music: total minutes. SoundCloud becomes your tape in the cloud. Erase & rewind, upload & remove as many tracks as you want within your total amount of minutes. Click here to learn about the different minute packs.

Extended privacy options: disable comments, hide stats and make comments private.

Housekeeping: all PRO accounts are now known as Premium accounts. Check out the full lowdown.

Introducing the new Premium account called ‘Lite’, the perfect entry-level account that lets you dive straight into the premium features for only €29.

Cheaper Premium accounts: we just lowered the price of the yearly Solo, Pro and Pro Plus accounts (€79, €250, €500).

Scup and Cloudpost: two new little apps that let you upload straight from your desktop (note: both are beta).

Oh. One more thing: the iPhone app, it’s finally here. Get it in the app store for €0,79 or $0,99.

Cool? We think so too. Pretty much every new feature was developed based on the awesome feedback you have given us in the past months. We hope you like the new stuff we’ve been working on and please don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in the comments.

The new version adds features like input processing effects powered by iZotope, expanded metadata support, file encoding, and more. The SoundCloud integration has also been polished to make it even smoother to export your iPhone recordings to the cloud.

Check out all the new features and get FiRe 1.3.0 in the App Store.

Record anywhere and upload to SoundCloud straight from the app.

Clicking on “Check out our Tracks” will redirect you to the Tracks tab in the top menu where they have embedded their set. Also very nice, instead of simply choosing auto-play, they have a prominent button in the center that will start playing the tracks when clicking Play:

They’ve also done this for the Remix tab:

The best part: they’re sharing with us and you how they made it so you can go ahead and create something similar. For you tech-heads out there, install the Facebook Static FBML app, then follow the instructions posted here and add the link to the .swf from the embed code you want to add. If you need help, send them a shout via Twitter head over here to get the full instructions. Nice!

Thanks, guys! Very beautiful.

While putting the finishing touches to the couple of goodies we have lined up for you, we’ve clearly underestimated the growth that SoundCloud has seen in the past weeks and months. Until end of last week, we juggled between finishing the upcoming features and at the same time making sure that the site is up during peak times (usually starting around 9pm CET).

After numerous night shifts and quick fixes we figured that these fixes are not fully satisfactory. We’re going to prioritize the improvements on the performance side of things before we launch any new features to the site.

All developers are currently on different tasks to improve the general experience, but here’s a quick higher-level outline we wanted to share with you:

New database servers:

We’re waiting for the new servers to arrive and they should be with us soon. We’ll be making sure to have them installed and ready-to-go as quick as possible but in the meantime, we have several backup machines that should be fully functional in the next days.

Dashboard:

We’re planning some fixes that will hopefully make the Dashboard performance better, especially after logging in.

Database:

We will optimize the general writing & reading off the databases, especially everything related to mailboxes, comments, tracks and API calls that will make the site faster.

We promise to continue working hard and will do our best to improve the short-term performance to give you back the best experience when uploading your tracks & artwork, when seeing the waveform being created and when commenting on tracks. Also, it looks like we’ll be able to bring back the delete option on your Dashboard very very soon. We’ll update this post as soon as it happens and also post to Twitter.

Our goal clearly is to bring SoundCloud back on the fast lane and we have made it our priority to ensure that SoundCloud runs smoothly.

We’ve set up a status blog over at our friends at Tumblr where we started posting updates about the site status. Feel free to follow the blog if you’re a Tumblr user or subscribe to the RSS feed. Additionally, we will keep you posted on our Twitter account.

On that note: we’re still looking for a kick-ass system administrator whose thrill is to help us scale a rapidly growing community of music lovers. If you’re the champion we’re looking for, apply here.

Again, from everyone at the SoundCloud HQ, apologies for the lack of communication on this.

Update (04/11 – 5.23pm): The Dashboard delete buttons are back. Thanks for your patience.

Update (06/11 – 11.55am): Phew that was a hard one to crack but we discovered a misbehaving monitoring script that made an unusual amount of requests in very small intervals. Good news is that soon after resolving, we observed a significant increase and stabilization of the site performance. The new databases have arrived and mostly installed and the fixes & improvements of the last days have also helped.

The two nice little screen grabs below will help you find it.

Here’s the upload page:

And here’s how it looks in your track settings (also works for tracks you have already uploaded) – don’t forget to save:

One important note: if you change the permalinks of existing tracks, please note that this will also affect links & widgets you’ve posted across the web. Please update these accordingly.

Have an awesome weekend, everyone!

So what’s the main reason you guys use Soundcloud and for what purpose?

In a nut shell, I guess the main use of SoundCloud for us is to help promote and share our releases on our two labels Excentric Muzik and Rekluse.

We use SoundCloud probably just in the same conventional way that most of its users do like uploading our music to the page and sharing it with others, but I am a massive fan just because of the fact that it is so good at doing this stuff. I have recently realised that it has now become almost central to all our online promotional operations.

We have 4 SoundCloud accounts, 2 for our labels and 2 DJ ones for myself and Fergie. No longer do I have to upload to all these different file sharing places, ending up with a lot of unrecognisable links. Now I just upload all the mixes and tracks to SoundCloud and then via the ’sharing’ options spread the music around all our other web sites like Myspace and Facebook. We realise that some of the people who like our music prefer different sites to others, some people purely like to discover new music through SoundCloud on it’s own, but what SoundCloud allows us to do is to spread the word across the sites very easily.

And as a bi-product of this we get to see how many people have actually listened and liked the stuff! On the Facebook pages in particular we do seem to get a much better response from posting the SoundCloud player than we do from just posting the direct link to Beatport. And it is also really useful for receiving label demos as it takes out the whole emailing and downloading process which can be very time consuming when you have 100+ demos to listen to.

SoundCloud is really impressive and has become a key component of our web presence. I now plan to see how far we can go with SoundCloud and just try to get the most out of it really.

For those out there who haven’t come across you yet, tell us a little bit about of what you do…

I’ll start with the labels: Excentric Muzik is Fergie’s own label that was originally started by him as an outlay for his own productions. Rekluse is a joint venture by myself and Fergie, with a focus more on releasing other like-minded artists work. You may have heard of Fergie through his time as a BBC Radio 1 presenter, he hosted a weekly underground electronic music show on the station for 5 years although he left the station about 3 years ago and since then has been concentrating on making his own music, which he has had a lot of success with. (For more info on him his biog at www.excentric-fergie.com has a lot more details).

I also DJ and make music but I am also responsible for most of the day to day goings on of both labels and so I am the one who looks after the SoundCloud pages (you can find out a little bit more about me at www.myspace.com/mrhenryvon).

How would you describe your and your label’s sound and style?

The music we release on both labels is normally always big-room peak-time kind of cuts, of the tech house / techno variety, big exciting electronic tunes basically. I guess most of the music kind of sits in the gap between underground and commerical dance music, DJs like Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, Dubfire, John Digweed, Sasha, Hell, Slam and Misstress Barbara have given us a lot of support. There’s so many great labels releasing a lot of great music at the moment so we’re just concentrating on one part of it, we do play some deeper and housier stuff in our sets though now and again.

For fans of the genre what have been your most successful releases to date that they will remember and what have you got in store?

Excentric Muzik’s most successful releases so far that you may have heard of have been Anon, Blackeye-P and Maktub, all from Ferg. We also did a big remix package at the start of the year featuring quite a few different remixers all taking on Ferg’s originals, artists such as Pig & Dan, Umek, Reset Robot and Alan Fitzpatrick, which went down really well. Recently we just released a brilliant new collaboration between Christian Smith & Reset Robot, called Elixir, with remixes from myself and also Gary Beck. And up next is a new solo effort from Fergie, Ragaroo.

The two releases people are most likely to have heard on Rekluse would have to be “Umek – 2nd To None”, our first release, which hit the number 1 spot in the Beatport techno charts and was still floating about in the top 100 6 months later. Was a really good track and we will be working with Umek next year on a follow up. Also “Loco & Jam – Medusa” has been massive one for us, with everyone from King Unique to the Japanese Popstars to Paul Woolford giving it a good hammering. Coming up we have releases from Alex D’Elia & Nihil Young, Matt Cooper, Electric Rescue, we are also currently working on an exciting singles compilation due out at the end of the year to celebrate our 1st birthday. This will be accompanied by a sampler of the release mixed by myself that will be available to download for free via the Rekluse Soundcloud page.

And of course listeners will be able to hear the new releases before they are released via the SoundCloud page! (always great to read people’s feedback and comments about the tracks).

Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions, guys!

We’re pleased to say that SoundCloud will be in Manchester for In The City this year. I’ll be taking part in a panel on Monday called “New Digital Weaponry” whilst Alex will be there on Tuesday as part of the Tribes, Fans & Followers session with our friends Ian Hogarth (Songkick), Sean Adams (Drowned In Sound), Anthony Volodkin (Hype Machine).

There’s also a whole load of amazing bands (over 150 in fact!) descending upon the city from the 18th – 20th October as part of the event. And the super-friendly chaps who are working hard to organise ITC have kindly offered two pairs of wristbands for us to give away to fans of SoundCloud.

To be one of the two winners couldn’t be simpler. Send us a tweet to @SoundCloud telling us why you think you should win the wristabands. We’ll pick our favourite two by 4pm today (GMT, Friday 16th). For more details of what you’ll win check here.

If you’re into hacking, music and Amsterdam, this one’s for you. Our friends Edial & Roel who just recently relocated to Berlin are co-organizing the Music & Bits conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday, October 21st. Pre-conference to the Amsterdam Dance Event, Music & Bits is merging music & technology and will also be the forum for the next Music Hack Day.

The program looks great and the list of speakers that will participate in both the conference and the Music Hack Day sounds exciting: Anthony of the Hype Machine, Matthew from Last.fm, Brian from The Echo Nest, Andie from RjDj and Dave & Eric from team SoundCloud will be joined by hackers from all across Europe to prototype awesome new projects on top of the companies API’s in just one day.

The event is free, if you haven’t registered yet and want to do so, click here.

Here’s a quick one for you with some exciting news and the kind request to help a fellow SoundCloud user. Leon Somov from Lithuania has just won the MTV Best Baltic Act Award for his collaboration with Jazzu. They both need your vote to make it to the European Best Act Award so let’s help ‘em out:

Voting literally takes a second and is possible until November 2nd:

Voting for Best European Act starts today and will run until 2 November when the top 5 acts with the most votes will be revealed. The ultimate winner of Best European Act will be announced live on the show on 5th November.

Let’s join forces and help getting a SoundClouder onto the big stage. By the way, here’s one of his tracks:

feat Jazzu – Mano (Remake) by leon somov

And a recent video:

Photo credit: MTV Europe