Alexander Ljung's dashboard

Hey guys,

Alex & Eric here. First off, we just got to say thanks! Those of you that have been around for a while know that we always appreciate the feedback you give us. There are a lot of insights, valid criticisms, and an amazing level of passion in this thread and it's great to see that you guys care about what happens here at SoundCloud.

The overall feedback after the new release could be summarized as: users with short or regular (track) length audio love the updates, and users with longer content are concerned about the minute level (but like the new features).

The change from tracks/month to total amount of minutes was a decision we discussed a lot and that was taken for several reasons, let us try to outline a few.

With the old model we assumed people would always upload a fixed amount of tracks per month. But people aren't always as creative each month, meaning some months you may need to upload a lot and some months you might not. The old model didn't support this at all and this was echoed by many users.

When you first sign up you might want to put up a bunch of your old tracks. With the old model you had to wait several months before you could get your older works online.

When collaborating, before a track is finished, you often need to send the same track back and forth between people several times. The old model wouldn't let you do this at all.

If you hit your monthly limit, you had no choice but to upgrade (or wait). There was no other way for you to get more tracks online (even if it was just a single track you needed to send).

So with the new release we wanted to solve these issues. We think a total limit rather than a monthly limit gives you more flexibility in choosing when to upload, what older things to put in the cloud and makes it possible to remove things in case you desperately need to get something new up.

We think the minute model does this much better than the tracks/month model and that it will make a positive difference for the thousands of artists, musicians, producers, studios & record labels on SoundCloud. Of course, as you guys realize, there's also a down-side. For users uploading long tracks this model is less suited than the old one.

We realize this but we also thought that for makers of longer content that publish a certain amount each month it might not be essential to keep everything online forever. So, it would make it possible to upload longer pieces, and once they become "out of date" remove and replace. For an account that's free and with no advertising, expiring links, popups etc. we thought the current Free account would work well. We believe that with a low price 'Lite' account, costing about the same as a cup of coffee per month, the 4 hour limit with the possibility of replacing tracks combined with all the other Soundcloud features, would be a pretty good deal.

Changing the model was a tough decision. Right now, we won't be changing back to the old model again BUT we will keep trying to improve on the new one. The suggestions here are all taken into serious consideration and discussed a lot here at the office. At this point though we don't have any clear suggestion for how exactly to improve things for you guys.

If you are a producer of longer content, have been with us for a longer time and feel that the minute limit is really a major problem to you, please post your username and email address here http://bit.ly/1H0r36 to get added to a mini list from where we can send an update asap in case we come up with an improvement for you guys (and girls).

Again, thanks big time for the passionate feedback!
Alex & Eric

Hey Emil, this is because you're technically still logged in as yourself over at soundcloud.com. If you'd log out and then check the cloudplayer or check it on a different browser (where you're not logged in to soundcloud.com) you'd not see the private track(s).

Hope that helps,
Alex

No problem!

Hi JP!

Ok, I think I know what you mean, hopefully this will help.

Like you suggest, its important to keep all the tracks from people you follow in one place, that would be here:
http://soundcloud.com/tracks/following

Other tracks, from people you don't follow (which could include new people putting things in your dropbox) end up here:
http://soundcloud.com/tracks/others

On both places you have the check-box filter to be able to quickly check that stuff that's only shared to a few people (like the screen-shot above).

Then we have the email notifications! How often and for what you recieve emails is pretty flexible under your email notification settings here:
http://soundcloud.com/settings/email

Hope that helps!

Hey, check this filtering option and see if that helps!

http://getsatisfaction.com/soundcloud...

Hey guys! Have you tried filtering the page by clicking the little checkbox option to only show tracks shared to a handful of people! Here's a descrption + screenshot:
http://getsatisfaction.com/soundcloud...

Hi! Try filtering with page by clicking the little checkbox option to only show tracks shared to a handful of people! Here's a descrption + screenshot:
http://getsatisfaction.com/soundcloud...

If you want a dropbox for a specific project you could also try setting up a moderated group for that (all groups have dropboxes). – Alexander Ljung, on June 28, 2009 18:21

Hey guys! If you feel you're getting to many track please try clicking the little checkbox that says "Only show tracks shared to a handful of people or less". This should make things more clear!

If you leave it checked it will remain checked next time you log-in too so you don't need to re-click it every time.

thanks! This remove button will be added soon! We didn't forget it but some last minute madness made it impossible to include, but it will return shortly!

Ok, thanks for the quick feedback guys. We put a little surprise up just now, have a look!

Thanks! I agree on that some more filters are needed & that it would be a bit of a drag to go through all those tracks at once! – Alexander Ljung, on June 18, 2009 19:58

that's a good idea.
If tracks shared to you are public it means they we're shared privately and later on changed to public. It could be the case that they were shared before release (private) and have been released since (then made public). – Alexander Ljung, on June 18, 2009 19:23

Ah, ok. One of the problems now is that you'll be seeing all of the tracks previously shared to you (i.e. not just since yesterday) all at once. That's why it might look a bit overwhelming right now, today. I'm checking if there's maybe something that could be done for this issue during the transition. (An indicator is also planned)

It should start feeling quite similar to how you're used to over the next few days though (since you won't get a whole bunch of tracks at once as now in the transition).

There will be more filters in under the Tracks tabs in the future allowing you to fine tune exactly what you'd like to see, I'm not sure on the exact release date for this though (but will check).

Hi there! Is your sc username Fidelium? Is this supposed to be a completely "secret" dropbox? I.e. do you only want a specific set of people to know and submit over it? If so you might want to create a new account and only share that dropbox URL wt these people? I'm assuming your username is the same as the official name of your label at the moment? It could be that you're getting a lot of tracks (is it really 9000? sounds very very very extreme!) since your label is probably quite popular and there's several people who'd like to submit their music to you?

If you want a specific "folder" for music only coming from a specific dropbox you could also try creating a moderated group and ask people to submit to the group (all groups have their own dropboxes).

Does that help?

Hi, yes, you're right, currently we don't have that feature on the new dashboard but it will be back (and improved).

Hi Rico,
unfortunately this is still the same problem as we spoke about before. The account will look 30 days back in time from today, count how many uploads and base your current quota on this. We're working on perhaps changing to a more intuitive way of calculating the quota.