Hear the…cloud.
In contemplating a better way to show off music in the e-land, for some reason it only recently occurred to me to try out SoundCloud. Turns out it’s a fairly nifty little service.
The premise is simple – users upload sound and music, and others can then stream it to their computers and devices, more or less like a sans-video YouTube (strange that these two things didn’t happen the other way around, but…whatever). A free account will let you upload two hours’ worth of audio (assuming reasonable compression, that’s likely less than 200MB – small in comparison to most of today’s big free hosting services, but hey, free is still free, and there don’t appear to be any ads). You’re also capped at 100 downloads per track, assuming you enable direct downloads (which it’s cool that you can). There are also some arbitrary limitations, such as only being able to create three different sets/groups/organizational what-have-yous to put your tracks in, but overall, it’s plenty sufficient for sharing out a few dozen songs or so.
Perhaps handiest of all, you can neatly embed a player for a track or entire setlist just about anywhere, even here in WordPress!
These are some old synthesizer compositions I did ten or more years ago and figured I’d stick on there for fun. Now that I have much better equipment, I might see about redoing some of them…
So, am I late to the party? Do any of you out there use SoundCloud? Or have you found any other good audio sharing services?
Also, I just noticed that Dictionary.com‘s word of the day is empurple – to make or become purple. I…kind of find it fantastic that that’s a thing.
Bene scribete.
Writin' Fish 
Yeah, I use SoundCloud a lot. It didn’t used to be so popular when I started using it, but now it seems like everyone does. I’ve found it useful for not only embedding music on my websites, but also for collaborating with other musicians. You can upload an audio file, enable downloads, and share the track privately with a few people. The only major downside that I’ve found with SoundCloud is that they make you pay to be able to replace the audio file of an existing track…
Hmm! There are some strange restraints, to be certain. I suppose there’s always deleting and reposting if you don’t mind killing the comments and stats. Maybe Google will eventually buy them up, loosen the ropes, and throw more bandwidth their way? (>^-‘)>
Also, you’ve got some pretty nifty stuff. Nice that you have all those different vocalists to work with!
Yeah, I guess you can’t have it all with any of these services.
Thanks for checking out my songs. Now that I think about it, I guess I have worked with a lot of vocalists. Some of them come to me, and others I request to sing on my originals. I thought you had some good vibes to yours, too. Of course, I’m always biased towards music with nice keyboards.
Nice – these are great. I haven’t played around with SoundCloud – might need to….
I especially like the first one – Darkened Angel has a good feel to it – can totally see it being used for something with a Pan’s Labyrinth-type feel.
You should! More music stuff on here is always good.
And thanks! I’m totally O.K. with Pan’s Labyrinth-y-ness.