Sound Cloud Review

by Eric Dybala
updated by Aaron Manns

Description

SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform which allows musicians to collaborate, promote and distribute their music. It has sometimes been described as being for audio what Flickr is for photos.  It’s LEGAL! J

"SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere.

Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks.

It takes just a click to share sounds to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare.

SoundCloud can be accessed anywhere using the official iPhone and Android apps, as well as hundreds of creation and sharing apps built on the SoundCloud platform."

Access

Completely Free to access http://soundcloud.com/

Cost if you want to upload your sounds:

€0/month or FREE - post 2hrs of sound 

€3/month or €29/year - post 4hrs of sound

€9/month or €99/year - post unlimited sound

Copyright

"After uploading a sound or set, you can select under which license you would like to release your piece of audio on SoundCloud. You can change the license via the sound settings (hover over your sound and click the pen icon below the waveform) at any time." - Soundcloud legal page

Sounds uploaded by users can be either All Rights Reserved or Creative Commons pieces.

It is possible to search by license as well as by key words. And when you upload your own work, you can select the license you want to use.

What the Tool Does Well

• Pretty easy way to store and share (and even sell) your work online. 
• While playing music, if you navigate away from the page, the music keeps playing. So you can explore and still listen.
• Aside from music, there are a lot of other varieties of sound - including podcasts, audio books, and sound effects. 
• The quality of a lot of the music is pretty good
• Many of the songs are under the creative commons license 
• You can control downloadability

What it Does Poorly

• There does not appear to be a way to search all the creative commons music, you have to specify your search.
• Search features are a little jumbled, sometimes hard to find what you are looking for. 
• The "Explore" function is rather limited and it only shows you a handful of the site's content.
  
• Not Free to store over 2 hours of music.
  

Additional Resources