New homes for your sounds: Audioboo, Ipadio, Soundcloud

Posted by IMR on 02 April 2010

VERY FEW INTERNET users actively seek out field recordings. If you want to increase the chances of your recordings being noticed, a good way is to find several different homes for them. Of course, if you’ve already collected some London sounds, then the London Sound Survey DropBox is like the open beak of a chick clamouring to be fed. It’s also well worth considering the excellent Freesound Project and SoundTransit websites.

However, none of them provide embeddable players for you to stream your sounds through to your own blog or website. This post is going to look at three sound-based services which let you use such players: Audioboo, Ipadio, and Soundcloud.

Audioboo has a clean and attractive-looking website with the slogan ‘Because sound is social’ on its homepage. It began life just over a year ago aimed at iPhone users wishing to record and upload their favourite sounds. These are encapsulated as individual entries called ‘boos’. It’s like Twitter with sound files. Audioboo recently added direct uploading from hard drives, which is what makes it of potential interest to field recordists. You can enter a title and tag words, and add geotags using a small Google Maps window.

The embeddable Audioboo player looks and sounds like this:

The artefacts at the beginning indicate a high compression ratio for streaming. In fairness to Audioboo, that initial blast of almost pure noise is untypical of pretty much any recording that’s likely to be uploaded there, and hardly any of their users will be bothered by the compression. The player is stylish but doesn’t provide an embed code for anyone wishing to stream your sounds elsewhere.

Audioboo makes effective use of word-of-mouth and social media like Twitter to promote itself. On the Everyone’s Boos page, entries were appearing this afternoon at the rate of about twenty an hour. Users can set up a personal profile, follow and be followed by other users, and make comments on entries. Radio broadcasters and other media professionals seem to get by far the most followers and comments.

Ipadio is similar to Audioboo in that it’s free, allows you to upload sound files from a PC or a mobile phone, displays all the latest uploads on its website, and also has a name for its users’ entries that sounds like a tribe of furry beings from In the Night Garden: ‘phlogs’. The Ipadio site is cluttered and busy-looking as it goes after potential paying customers in a more direct way than Audioboo. You can enter a title, tag words and Google Maps data. There’s also a field in which you can type some descriptive guff about your recording which is carried over onto the Ipadio player:

While the player maybe isn’t as smart-looking as Audioboo’s, an embed code is provided, and it’s this which could help your recording of the weekly emptying of the Sidcup bottle bank go viral.

On the Latest Phonecasts page, it’s clear there just aren’t as many people using Ipadio as Audioboo. Your recording will stay on the first couple of pages for longer, but with a smaller audience to notice it. How the tradeoff compares between Ipadio and Audioboo isn’t clear: Audioboo doesn’t yet show how many people have listened to your track.

Audioboo and Ipadio are free to their small-fry users, but neither of them yet offers the ability to assert your own Creative Commons licence. Field recordists may also feel at sea among what is a very different recording ethos. The field recordist’s aim is usually to remove their presence as much as possible from the recording, like the way photographers avoid putting their fingers over the lens when taking a picture, and in so doing become the hole-in-the-wall through which the listener can hear a different time and place.

This plainly isn’t the goal of many Audioboo and Ipadio users, and it takes a little marketing stardust to suggest that some kind of community is being built, although in fairness no more so than with any other form of social media. By necessity Audioboo and Ipadio are cultivating audiences which can be sold either to advertisers or to big players forking out for their own dedicated channels.

Soundcloud is aimed foremost at musicians and it has a range of features and an eclecticism in its users which makes it more appealing than some of the competition. Not only can you upload to your own named channel, but so can anyone else if you give them the URL to your DropBox. When you upload a sound file you can specify the level of rights protection, including Creative Commons options. Three different embeddable players are offered. First, the stripped-down mini player:

Next, the standard player:

The third option allows you to include artwork in a 300x300 pixel panel. The colour schemes of all the players can be customised and 128kbps MP3s (it says here) are created for streaming. Soundcloud has a lot of other features to enable the sharing of recordings among its users, and a tiered system of memberships from a basic free package to premium ones aimed at record companies. The ‘Lite’ version at €29 a year offers good value for money.

If Soundcloud is so good, why waste time with Audioboo and Ipadio? First, they’re both free. Second, the rolling pages of entries do expose your recordings to an audience who would otherwise be unlikely to come across them. Third, the Ipadio player displays a description of your track. Finally, and slightly unfortunately, Soundcloud is occasionally a bit buggy when it comes to uploading.

Verdict: sign up for the free version or 14-day trial of the Lite version of Soundcloud, and try out uploading to Ipadio and AudioBoo.

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