In case you missed the kick off of our SoundCloud Sessions, here’s a little description of what it’s all about:

These sessions are intimate performances recorded in the SoundCloud office located in Berlin. They’re dedicated to showcasing the many talented bands and musicians on SoundCloud! The first session was with the lovely Lail Arad.

Our second session is with SoundCloud’s very own Ian Hooper, a great musician from the US of A. Ian’s friends, Andrew Saunderson and Claudio Donzelli, joined him and played a great acoustic set. Due to the rain and wind outside, they performed on the office steps connecting the two floors for all to hear.

To check out the full session with live videos, visit the SoundCloud Sessions tumblr. For now, you can listen to the set below for all the session’s recorded songs.

SoundCloud sessions are recorded in both audio and video format, and will be added to the SoundCloud Sessions tumblr. To keep yourself updated, you can follow us on Twitter, Tumblr and/or subscribe to this WordPress blog! And keep in mind, if you’re a musician heading to Berlin or already in Berlin, drop us a track in the SoundCloud Sessions DropBox to get your music heard!

Send me your track

Don’t be shy now!

This is part 1 in a series profiling SoundCloud users using Creative Commons licenses. To see the whole series, click here.

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Those of us who grew up with access to children’s books know how important they are, but millions of children in India have been raised without well-made books in their language. Pratham Books was founded over 15 years ago to address this problem, and in the years since have published hundreds of high-quality children’s books in different Indian languages. In 2008, they started releasing books under Creative Commons licenses, and earlier this year collaborated to release audiobook versions of some of their titles, also using Creative Commons. We caught up with Gautam John from Pratham Books to talk about how SoundCloud has helped them distribute their audiobooks online.

Hello Gautam! Can you describe the goals of Pratham Books, and the kind of audio you’re producing? What is the background behind that?

We didn’t set out to produce audio books – we set out with a mission to put a book in every child’s hand. That said, we have always wanted to be as inclusive as is possible but as a small non-profit, we do function under severe constraints of time, money and bandwidth. I’ll let my colleague Maya explain how it came to pass:

When we tweeted about the voice volunteers of the Rotary Helen Keller Talking Book Library, our friends @owos mentioned that Radio Mirchi had done something similar. A quick Google search ensued and with an email address at hand, a mail was sent out to the Radio Mirchi team. A few days later, we managed to speak to Pallavi from the Radio Mirchi team. The aim was to ask about their CSR initiative of recording books for the National Association of the Blind and write a blog post about it. During the course of the conversation, we got talking about Pratham Books. And thanks to some of our Creative Commons licensed books, our books were readily available for them to record.

Where would these audio books go? To the National Association of the Blind.

Recently we received some of the audio books recorded by Radio Mirchi and we were delighted to hear the results. Crowding around a laptop, we listened to the recording with a child-like eagerness. The recordings were so good that everyone in the room was smiling and clapping by the end of the story. The Radio Mirchi team has done a fantastic job and we are sure that the children who hear these stories will have smiles as big as the ones on our faces.”

That comes from a blog post we’ve written that has more reading.

These audio books and more are also available over at Inclusive Planet, a online platform for the print impaired to connect over accessible books, ideas and conversations.

What are some of the difficulties in producing a project that spans so many languages?

For us, we face challenges of translation and all the other associated problems of proof reading. However, the production of the audio books was done with Radio Mirchi – we have them to thank for this.

How did you start releasing material with a Creative Commons license? How have the licenses been beneficial to your organization’s aims?

The Creative Commons licensing model is one that helps us achieve many of our aims of flexibility and scalability in helping catalyse our mission of a book in every child’s hands. In particular, three things stand out – a shared value system of sharing and openness, a community that was deeply embedded in these ideals and, from our perspective, it is massively scalable as well.

Is there any book on SoundCloud that you’re most proud of, or has an interesting story behind it’s creation?

Yes! In particular, Moon and the Cap. Barkha Deva, who follows us on Twitter and is an avid supporter of our work shared her experience on Twitter and then volunteered to and did record this one along with Radio Mirchi.
Moon and the Cap- English by prathambooks

How has Soundcloud helped you? Do you find yourself engaging with the community, and are you able to use your Soundcloud page as a showcase for your material?

Oh it’s been fantastic! Without Soundcloud we had no real way of sharing this wonderful work with a wider audience in an easy and elegant manner – Soundcloud has made it possible for us to showcase this jointly created work in a way we would never have been able to do and also to engage with the Soundcloud community too. Thank you Soundcloud!

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Thank you to Gautam for taking the time out from his busy schedule to share these insights on using SoundCloud for audiobooks and Creative Commons licensed content. Stay tuned over the next few days for more interviews with CC users on SoundCloud!

Choice is good, right? We just love that we can pick our favorite ice cream flavor or favorite color for a new shirt. When it comes to audio creation, it’s even better when your choice creates more choice for others.

Today, SoundCloud is opening up a bit more to allow you to find and share more sounds to use and reuse. With new search and discovery features for Creative Commons tracks, your creations can go much further. More options give you more freedom over your audio content on the web. It helps expose your work and find people to collaborate with that you perhaps wouldn’t normally find. We’re excited about this update and we hope you are too. We say “New features!” you say “Yay!”

Here’s what’s new:

1. Advanced Search

That’s right: finally! You’ve been waiting for this for a while and we’re happy to announce that advanced search options are now available. You’re now able to search for things like genre, tags, a specific label, track type and much more. Check the screenshot below for the different options and try it out for yourself in the search feature.

2. Browse by tag

Also new: clicking the tag on a player will lead you to a new Explore page that lets you discover other tracks by tags where you can also choose to see the latest tracks added or sorted by popularity. A tagcloud on the right of the page lets you jump straight into a different genre. (Pro tip: choose your genre tags wisely, young Jedis, this will provide the best search results for everyone).

3. Creative Commons integration

You’ve probably also noticed another addition in the advanced search options: search for tracks released under a Creative Commons license. Creative what?! Glad you’re asking! Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that has released a set of free and voluntary copyright licenses. With Creative Commons licenses, creators have the freedom to choose how their work can be used, shared and re-used. There are six different licenses that provide users with different levels. Browsing audio released under CC just became a whole lot easier with a dedicated page we just deployed to the site. Check it out: http://soundcloud.com/creativecommons

Not only can you search for tracks released under CC licenses but we also gave the SoundCloud player a little face-lift. It now displays the type of CC license in the top right corner of the player:

Update: Creative Commons just updated their blog with some notes about the integration including an interview with our own Parker Higgins, who has been a driving force getting the integration done: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23018

By the way: third-party application developers now too can access tags and creative commons content via the API so you get the same experience when using your favorite apps.

Get involved! We’d love to see you contribute!

Sounds of CCentury is a group on SoundCloud collecting the coolest CC-licensed and No Rights Reserved historic audio. We’ve started it out with a few public domain tracks, but if you run an archive, have access to other interesting public domain tracks, or just happened to have a field recorder handy when something amazing happened, please contribute to this collection. If you can’t contribute, there’s already some incredible stuff to listen to, and there will be more added in the next days and weeks. Check out the first contributions below and submit yours here: http://soundcloud.com/groups/sounds-of-ccentury

Creative Commons Mashup Contest: get your mashup machines rollin’ for a change to win a yearly SoundCloud Pro account (worth 250 Euro) in this little competition we just pushed using SoundCloud-Remix, the remix app we’ve posted about last week. Get the full details right here.

Oh and one more thing: Creative Commons also joined SoundCloud with an official account so if you fancy checking them out, follow at will.

Keep an eye out in the next couple of days, as we’ll be featuring quite some exciting SoundCloud members working with audio licensed under Creative Commons. This will happen right here on the blog, starting tomorrow.