14 DAY TRIAL // SoundCloud, the music sharing - and now audio recording - platform, has released its official Android app, after an iPhone one was made available earlier this month. While it's not on par with the iPhone app, it's surprisingly feature rich and rather snappy for a first release.
"Yeah, we’ve heard you – you’ve been patiently waiting for this one. It was a challenge for us to keep this a secret for a few months and that makes it even more exciting to be finally announcing the release of the official SoundCloud app for Android," SoundCloud announced.
"The official SoundCloud Android app lets you easily access, browse and listen to the sounds shared to you while you’re on the road and away from your computer," it added.
"The app also includes recording functionality that lets you capture any sound around you and instantly save it in the ‘Cloud. Stay tuned, plenty more to come too," it explained.
The Android app covers all the main things you'd want to do with SoundCloud. You can browse and search for tracks, or check out the ones from the people you follow.
Of course, you can play any of the tracks using a version of the signature SoundCloud waveform player. The streaming part is quite impressive, tracks start playing instantly, at least on a solid WiFi connection.
You can then listen to the tracks in the background, while you check out what else is new on SoundClound, or do anything else on your phone.
The app also comes with the brand new record feature that's been touted recently. Unfortunately, the recordings have a 5 minute limit, unlike the iPhone.
There are other limitations as well, you can't comment with the Android app, or geo-tag your uploads. However, the SoundCloud team promises that all of these features are coming soon enough and it just wanted to have an app in time for the holidays so it focused on the core experience. For a first release it's a solid app and SoundCloud users with an Android phone should definitely check it out.
