SoundCloud

From IndieWeb

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.

Criticism

Screening and termination by BigContent

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

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.

See Also