SoundCloud – Would It Work For Podcasting?

I'm thinking of leaving Podomatic for Soundcloud. What are your thoughts on that move?

cliff big fan currently with libsyn but i'm on the 50$ plan for 1gb a month its not enough space and i'm thinking of soundcloud after watching video this is a old post so i wanted to know did you have new info because i've been listening to show haven't heard you speak of this recently. please help i've also left a voicemail 

only problem is that Podcasting is in Beta testing & only looking for spoken word podcasters at the moment.  I am a dj and wanted to integrate that but they won't give me the RSS feed which I thought they would.

 @Cliff Ravenscraft I just signed up for my Libsyn account yesterday.  I'm trying to work out a few kinks in my rss feed and then the podcast will be off to the races.  Love your podcast and appreciate the great info!

Another addition to my thoughts on SoundCloud that other podcasts should consider. After switching one of my shows over to SoundCloud I immediately started getting complains from my users that they were getting a SoundCloud error message on my post instead of the player. 

I've seen this error message pop up rarely myself but usually a quick reload will load the HTML5 player but I've received enough messages from my audience that a reload isn't working that it is some concern to me. So what I've had to do is post a back up link to the mp3 file on all my posts. 

I'm not sure if this is a network problem on the end of my users or with SoundCloud but I can tell you that I never had this problem when I was hosting with Libsyn. 

SoundCloud does offer some benefits over Libsyn, such as the HTML5 player but they really do seem to be in the growing stage and have a lot of issues to be worked out. I think maybe in a year or so they could be a great platform for podcasters but between now and the A LOT of work needs to be done. 

It's a bit later now, and I've watched the video a couple times.

The comments here just clarified and sort of bummed me out. I thought that the Soundcloud 12/36 hour plans were per year with a new year bringing new capacity, but I guess it's just that on a per-year basis, one pays to maintain the space. Bummer. 

What I feel is needed is Libsyn's rate plan and service at the back end, and SoundCloud's player at the front end. 

I'm not doing the PAM Wordpress blog, and instead I have Squarespace for my show notes and presentation. And so all the talk about WP plugins is lost on me. (I used to use WP but jumped ship a couple years back.) So adapting the PAM lessons to Squarespace can be hit and miss.

What I've been going around and around about is that Squarespace provides an enclosure link at the bottom of the post. I can style it to call attention. I can hide it and use another player on a per-post basis (which defeats the point of Content Management, eh?) I was hoping to use the Libsyn player in each post, set to play that episode.

Problem is, the Libsyn Wizzard Player is... well, in my experience, crap. Nearly all the docklets had something wrong with them. Wrong feed address (what do I want with an internal Libsyn feed?), Download doesn't trigger a download but a player in a new window, Email option was preloaded with the wrong link...

I wrote and they were willing to take down offending docklets but seemed unable to fix the thing. 

So I was getting all hot for SoundCloud since their player is so easy to use and rich with sharing features. A clear play button and a one click, "real" download button were winners. I was thinking of jumping ship to SC, but I think like many others here, until they offer the Libsyn style archive+new 30 days model, this won't work out. I was doing my research on it, reading these comments, because I was trying to make a plan for how much it would cost to move the back catalog at one go. Doesn't look like it will happen. Yet. :-(

So back at Squarespace, equally useless in addressing questions about if the HTML of their enclosure link could be moved from the bottom to a more conspicuous place, I'm looking at just needing to use their link but styling it so it calls some attention.

Sorry this is so long. I was really holding out for the Soundcloud option to put some of this to rest.

@GSPN @soundcloud Thanks Cliff, I didn't see any update on mp3 URL related issues though. In the interview, Ben said he'd get back to you.

Might influence decisions : SoundCloud Coming to Expanded Tweets - http://bit.ly/L0KteR. SoundCloud can be played within Twitter by just expanding the Tweet.  I'll continue to use the free version here and there uploading small snippets of "what's on my mind" type of thing. 

I have decided to give SoundCloud another try for 2 reasons: 

1. Their HTML5 player

2. The ability of others to embed the player into their website. 

I live in Japan and the bulk of my audience is listening to my show on their mobile device. This is common in Japan as many people don't have computers but do all their computing on their phone. So it was very important for me to have a player that can be played on a mobile device. 

The second reason is that I have recently been approached by a few fairly large websites here in Japan to have my show featured on their site. Rather than just linking to the show post on my website they wanted some ability to embed the show on their site. While they could just take the mp3 and embed that I liked the branding opportunities of the SoundCloud player.

So I will try it for a while and report back to see if I prefer SoundCloud over Libsyn. So far here are some of my complaints about the SoundCloud player.

1. The play button is too small. This is the most important element of the player and yet it's one of the smallest buttons.

2. Since I have comments turned off the waveform is ugly and impractical. A smaller version to show the audio progress would be much better.

3. The Like button is useless for anyone not signed into SoundCloud. 

4. The player doesn't display the full title of my show.

5. The share button cuts off the title and is too small and is not prominently displayed. 

Sorry this post is getting so long but I feel that if SoundCloud wants to attract more podcasters they need to allow us more customization of the player. Right now it is designed around a community that they want you to build on SoundCloud but I'd rather keep my audience on my website and not send them somewhere else. It has potential so hopefully they will listen to the feedback from podcasters and adjust their service to better fit our requirements. 

I've thought about using SoundCloud and even signed up for their service mainly to check out their HTML5 player but since they limit the amount of minutes you can upload I don't see how they would be of any benefit to podcasters. The only plan that offers unlimited storage is their Pro Plus plan but I get all the same benefits using LibSyn's app400 plan that is $50 cheaper. 

Cliff, great job on this interview. But I think an important point to clarify about SoundCloud's storage policy is that storage is NOT unlimited, except for the top Pro Plus package. I've been a SoundCloud user for a couple of years now (just for personal stuff) and so I was quite excited to hear Ben say it was unlimited. I'm soon to launch my first podcast and was thinking I'd go for the Solo account and get a great deal on podcast storage and delivery. And I see from at least one comment below, and from your own 99.995% certainty Cliff, that others thought this too. But I dug around their site and found a Help page on Uploading and Transcoding that says it's not unlimited:

"It says I have 120 minutes. Is that in total or monthly? All our subscription plans come with a total of upload minutes/hours -- they don't reset every month. This also applies to yearly subscriptions. If you renew your yearly subscription, you are only securing the upload time you had previously. You can always easily remove and add new tracks within these total upload minutes."

Link: http://help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/247483-it-says-i-have-120-minutes-is-that-in-total-or-monthly-

So, my reading of that says that you need to remove tracks to gain more room--obviously not ideal for podcasting. Unless Ben had something else in mind for the podcasting beta program with regard to these limits (which would be exciting to hear) I think anyone wanting to use SoundCloud for podcasting would need to go with their top-of-the-line plan. I know you said Cliff for you this represents a good deal, but for smaller podcasters (like myself) the high cost of their Pro Plus plan eliminates SoundCloud as an option unfortunately. Because otherwise I think their features and service are great.

Thanks.

Cliff, as an Aussie I constantly keep note of USD V Aussie $, and looking up Euros is just a matter of typing '27 euros to dollars' into Google to get an estimate. So I was amazed that you mentioned the currency issue on Podcast Answer Man. Perhaps US people aren't used to having to do currency exchanges? We have to remember it is the Worldwide Web, or am I missing the point on the currency issue?

The interview was interesting. I'm really surprised that Ben didn't have answers to a lot of your questions. I hope he gets back to you soon so you can give us an update. It was great that he reached out to you and I think it will cause them to make some improvements to the service they deliver because it was obvious that some features hadn't been considered prior to launch.

I have an account with SoundCloud and they recently introduced a feature that allows me to upload episodes directly from Spreaker which saves time in my work flow. Thanks for taking the time to spread the word about media hosting alternatives. Much appreciated. 

Thanks Cliff for this video on SoundCloud. It has been getting a lot of press lately and I just thought it was like another MySpace network never thinking it could be used for a podcast. Something I wasn't clear on from your interview. For the Solo account it says 12 hours of storage is that per month or for the entire year? Do prior monthly audio uploads get archived like Libsyn?

Good stuff! I've also used SoundCloud for a few things and I've enjoyed the additional features available. I recorded New York Metropolitan Opera's Tom Hammons singing the Walnut Hills High School alma mater and was able to share it with WHHS alumni (http://soundcloud.com/butchgibson/sursum-ad-summum). The iPhone app works pretty well too. I've been able to stream content and was impressed. 

 @GSPN I really enjoyed this discussion. It answers a lot of questions on how SoundCloud can be viable for podcasters. Currently, I use blubrry as a media host and am considering moving to libsyn, since it is pretty much considered to be the gold standard of media hosts. This opens my eyes to the potential that SoundCloud "could be" a choice I need to consider! There are many questions you raised that still need to be answered. Are you considering using SoundCloud as a media host? Thanks again for doing this!

Dude, thank you so much for doing this. I was actually just toying around with Soundcloud this weekend and thinking to myself that it could possibly work well for my podcast. But I had similar questions to what you asked in the video. Thank you!

Btw, one thing I was unclear about - If I embed it into my blog using their HTML5 player, will that show up in my iTunes feed? I would've thought that you need to have a download link in order for it to show up. Am I mistaken?

We've been using @SoundCloud for a few weeks now and our listeners are really enjoying the added community interaction it brings.  Here's one of our recent podcasts that got quite a bit of conversation. http://soundcloud.com/goldenspiralmedia/tfp-episode-431-the-end-of-all

@GSPN Great video podcast Cliff@ #SoundCloud