Soundcloud has sort of taken the music community by storm this past year. Starting about a year ago they just announced they are 500,000 users strong last week on their Twitter page. The service is designed for musicians to share music, generally with each other and allow for a commenting system for that music. Other features include a music dropbox and and enmbedable/customizable java player.
They have announced at NAMM that they are parterning with several companies, the first of which is Presonus to allow for direct uploading to the service from audio applications. Audio File Engineering is another partner and it is reported that Ableton Live will soon include the feature as well.
This is exciting news for the site and for the music web business. We have seen this sort of integration with other social networking services before, but not in the music world. How the feature is exactly going to be implemented is unclear at this point. Soundcloud has grown in large part due to its ability to easily distribute audio files and remix packs online. The ability to upload individual tracks within an audio project would be a useful one indeed.
Quote Alexander Ljung, SoundCloud CEO:
“We’re very excited to be launching the first of our music softwareintegrations with PreSonus and Audiofile Engineering. With these upcoming partnerships it’s possible to imagine a production workflow in which you produce a track, upload it to SoundCloud, and send it direct to Abbey Road for mastering without any files hitting your desktop. We’re imagining a future where music professionals can seamlessly use the web together with their desktop tools in a fully integrated and extremely powerful combination. The SoundCloud platform and our open API, in combination with progressive companies like PreSonus and Audiofile Engineering, are making it possible for this future to arrive in 2010.”
Popularity: 8% [?]