While working on Santana’s Trumpeter, Bill Ortiz’s upcoming Website using the www.fourfour.com Band Website CMS I had to create a few pages to showcase his music. Featuring his latest release was easy to-do by using the built-in “Store” and music player widget in the CMS. But then I had to create two pages to feature “Live with Santana” and another entitled “As a Guest Artist” and upload a number of one-minutes samples of music he has played on including Toni Toni Toni, Luce, Rebeca Mauleon, and Joyce Cooling just to name a few. After considering a custom hack of the Yahoo Media Player, and a couple others, I landed on Soundcloud.com .
The new feature to reach out to your Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail contacts is pretty nifty to get the word out that you are on Soundcloud. Also the Social functionality is tops, you simply click anywhere on the time-line of the sound file and you can leave a comment, after logging in at Soundcloud of course. The widgets are up-to-date looking in presentation and easy to use. For free accounts, if I have this correct, you have a limit of minutes of audio ( 120mins ) you can upload, but there are no limits on outbound streaming. The site has other “fee based” options to be able to share audio with others. Check it out here.
This is some serious cool-factor. Below is the “standard” Soundcloud widget I made for my band. I would show you Bill’s widget but you will have to wait until we launch his new site. The Premium widgets look great and come with their Premium services. BTW, you can upload multiple songs into one widget. You can also embed these nifty widgets on Facebook via the Soundcloud Player Facebook App.
Premium Widget example: