What to look for in a song-hosting site? Is Soundcloud the best now?

[alexis]

In terms of things to look for in a site to post music on:

1) Quality of the sound itself (compression problems, etc.). I know that in Soundcloud you can download a lossless file, but as I understand it playing from their website is still only 128 kbps MP3?
2) "Ownership" of what is posted. I know sites like youtube and others say they can control your posted music to one degree or another.
3) Other important things?

Thanks!

P.S. This post in the "Production Forum" didn't seem like a great match to me, but I couldn't actually think of a better one, sorry if wrong choice and of course Mods please feel free to move as you may see fit.

[SafeandSound Mastering]

For info value, the majority of my independent clients seem to have left Myspace in favour of Soundcloud or ReverbNation.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
music mastering

[OneWorld]

For info value, the majority of my independent clients seem to have left Myspace in favour of Soundcloud or ReverbNation.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
music mastering

I am one of those brand loyal people who stuck with MySpace through thick and thin, much to my dis-appointment. MySpace was around long before the FaceBooks and such and offering a great service to musicians. But then they 'improved' it. During this process they offered users the opportunity to match the UserID with the MySpace email address, great I thought, but what they didn't tell us that the UserID would be lost for good. Up to that point I was getting 100+ plays a day, since losing my original ID that has shrunk to a handful.

MySpace should be made an object lesson in how to turn a clean lean and mean site into a cluttered, obfuscating unresponsive mess - it's a right old dog's dinner, and why the hell does FaceBook keep popping up - if I want FB I shall go to it, same for other artists songs playing automatically when my own end.

I uploaded identical files to MySpace, ReverbNation and Soundcloud and ReverbNation came out sounding better. indiecharts.com sounds OK but only came across that site a few weeks ago. But they do warn users that if they reset their UserID, it is cast in stone and cannot be changed, why oh why did MySpace have the common sense to do that too - what a bunch of twerps. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but you can turn a silk purse into a load of cr*p

[SafeandSound Mastering]

You may wish to investigate putting together your own website, that is a fairly low cost option
these days. (My site costs about £75.00 a year, it is very basic and hardly a great design but my site is functioning well and it keeps costs low) Have a think if your own site might provide benefits over sound cloud etc. You can still host your music elsewhere and link to it I think if bandwidth is an issue.

SafeandSound Mastering
Audio mastering

[Gadget13769]

You may wish to investigate putting together your own website, that is a fairly low cost option
these days. (My site costs about £75.00 a year, it is very basic and hardly a great design but my site is functioning well and it keeps costs low) Have a think if your own site might provide benefits over sound cloud etc. You can still host your music elsewhere and link to it I think if bandwidth is an issue.

SafeandSound Mastering
Audio mastering

Good idea, but does anyone know of a (preferably free) Soundcloud-style player that could be used to give a similar animated visual representation of the waveform?

[HollowAxis]

Bandcamp is best for quality/options.
You can have FLAC/WAV/MP3 and almost every other format available for people to free stream or download.

I think you can add a waveform view player, but it isn't there by default.
You can do so much with bandcamp, I much prefer it to soundcloud.
Can even point your domains DNS to it if you want to.

[HollowAxis]

Oh no, Just reading Bandcamps FAQ again. Their streaming is also 128. Just the downloads are available in all formats.
Now I'm going to try find a site that allows free streams in better than 128... I don't think there is one...

[SafeandSound Mastering]

I have seen a lot of forum posts that have the Soundcloud waveform in the signature so maybe you can do something similar on a website ? I imagine it is some HTML or similar, I am afraid my HTML etc is rather limited. I host .wavs myself.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
music mastering

[BenLD]

I have seen a lot of forum posts that have the Soundcloud waveform in the signature so maybe you can do something similar on a website ? I imagine it is some HTML or similar, I am afraid my HTML etc is rather limited. I host .wavs myself.

cheers

SafeandSound Mastering
music mastering

Yes you can upload your tracks to Soundcloud and then add them to your webpage as html - if you create a 'set' of tracks on Soundcloud you can have several tracks in one player.

Ben

[johnny h]

Yes soundcloud is the one to use, its great.

[Red Mastering]

my voice goes to bandcamp as well
I uploaded audio on soundcloud and it sounds really bad
for mastering studio, audio samples sounding bad is not a good thing
maybe bandcamp streams 128k, I dunno
I know you can upload 24 bit files, and/or wav and flac
I know also that my samples off bancamp sound good,
no comparison to soundcloud (very same audio files)
here - http://redmastering.co.uk/portfolio.html
all samples above are hosted on bandcamp
check same samples quality on soundcloud here - http://soundcloud.com/red-mastering

bandcamp also is targeted for indie artist supporting sell of files

[aarvin2]

Youtube nowadays streams at up to 192 and the compression honestly sounds the best(upload in WAV format).

Second is Bandcamp(upload in WAV) ...less impressive than Youtube.

Soundcloud sounds like poo to be honest.

[Pete Kaine]

I am one of those brand loyal people who stuck with MySpace through thick and thin, much to my dis-appointment.

Have you seen the promo for the forthcoming redesign? It's looking very, very slick even if it does feel a little too late to the game.

http://new.myspace.com/

[petev3.1]

You could also try Aurovine. Very good in most ways but I'm not sure yet about the audio quality. It can't be any worse than Soundcloud.

[Madman_Greg]

Soundcloud can provide the HTML to imbed on your own site

sample as follows - using the HTML provided by soundcloud to show its easy

Passion acoustic demo by Normans mate

Personally the way social media is being used at the moment, I would consider a band page on facebook as the front door, with the imbedded sound cloud player (or something similar)