14 DAY TRIAL // SoundCloud has been looking to reinvent itself and is positioning its service as a YouTube for audio of sorts, moving away from the previous focus on being a launchpad for budding artists and more towards a mainstream audio hosting platform.
This opens up the site to a much larger potential audience, but it may also alienate its existing users. So far, there's been no major outcry, so it may be working, or at the very least, SoundClound hasn't lost its initial usefulness.
Now it's expanding further on the idea of mainstream appeal with SoundCloud Labs a new website that showcases projects and features that may still be in testing, built on the SoundCloud platform.
The idea is to have a central place to showcase interesting uses of the tools SoundCloud provides.
"SoundCloud Labs showcases a number of experimental projects, features and apps all built using SoundCloud’s platform," the page reads.
"They’re hosted here to give you a place to find some of our crazier, cutting-edge ideas and to show what our developer team gets up to when they’re not sleeping," it adds.
"Please keep in mind that all apps are experimental and while we’ll try to support them as best as possible, they come with no guarantees. Take a look around and let us know what you think," it warns.
There are four apps available in Labs for now, each aimed at quite different use cases. Social Unlock, for example, is a way of rewarding fans with free streaming or downloads in exchange for social interactions, a download for a tweet and so on.
Another app in Labs, TakesQuestions provides a way for friends or followers to post any question for you to answer. Importer is a useful tool enabling users to upload tracks to their SoundCloud account via alternative methods, such as email, a direct URL or even over the phone.
Finally, there is a plugin for the Google Apps version of Gmail which enables you to listen to a SoundCloud track linked to in an email from inside Gmail, like you can YouTube videos for example.