SoundCloud
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SoundCloud is a silo for hosting/sharing/commenting on sounds and music.
It allows embedding of hosted content through the use of iframes.
IndieWeb uses
- acegiak.net embeds songs created by others that are on SoundCloud as a way of linking to the content without claiming ownership.
- Barnaby Walters posts audio to SoundCloud and embeds it on waterpigs.co.uk, e.g. http://waterpigs.co.uk/notes/4VZBsx/
Criticism
Screening and termination by BigContent
- 2014-07-01 Soundcloud continues to push boundaries of privacy policies; enables Universal to screen, monitor, and terminate accounts by Valerie Lee
Flash still required on desktop
Despite having an HTML5 version of the player, the desktop version still requires Flash in order to play audio. You can apparently get around this with User Agent spoofing: [1]
Commentary lock-in
When the SoundCloud player is embedded in other posts on other Silos or the web, all comments / likes / etc. are not shown. All the community building effort is locked-in to the SoundCloud site itself. A way to export / relay all commentary for a given track or playlist into Indieweb would be highly desirable. This is important data being produced by individuals that represents valuable information about a given track, and there is currently no way to share this on the open web other than copy and pasting all the text from soundcloud.com, with very poor formatting. A bridgy feature request was filed: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy/issues/587
Speculative Shutdown
- 2017-07-12 Soundcloud laid off 40% of its staff last week and some speculation indicates it may not last. At present, Soundcloud doesn't have a bulk export feature.
- 2017-08-11 Billboard reports on a $170 million infusion. With this founder Alex Ljung will step down as CEO, letting Kerry Trainor (former Vimeo CEO) take over.
How to
How to export your data
Soundcloud doesn't have a bulk export feature, but some of the following potential methods exist to export content.
- Manual method within Soundcloud: Account holders can make all your tracks private, then make them downloadable, and then download them individually. Pro subscription users should be able to do this one at a time.[2]
...start on your track page in order to narrow down the number of clicks you need to make. I see you're on a Pro plan, so you don't necessarily need to enable downloads for your tracks and change the privacy settings, but can go to your tracks' edit mode and download the original from there.
- For those on WordPress, Blubrry offers an export path that maintains metadata as well as content. For instructions, see this article.
- 3rd party developer tool
- http://soundcloud-download.com/
- JDownloader details
- The Huffduffer bookmarklet can be used to process files for potential download. Note that this may take a good bit of time and manual labor and isn't recommended for accounts with large numbers of files.
- other methods...