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.