We’re excited today to announce a partnership with Songsinc. They share our vision of making music creation more accessible and collaborative with a unique twist in that they provide a consignment store for unreleased audio tracks to get you started. They make it possible for anyone to build upon raw audio tracks that would have otherwise never seen the light of day. Through partnerships with artists and labels they offer 1500+ unreleased audio tracks written and recorded by successful artists. You parachute in, add your own lyrics and melody parts to take it the last mile, turn it into a hit and then you split royalties with the original artist. It’s a true win-win because amateur musicians (or even experienced songwriters grappling with writer’s block) get a starting point to work from while the original artists can monetize assets that would have otherwise collected dust.

We worked with Songsinc and their technical team to integrate our recording technology directly into their web site and make it possible for anyone to begin working with any of the tracks immediately online thereby bypassing the software, expertise, bandwidth and time constraints that typically preclude would-be users from getting started.

You can read the formal press release and create your own version of any of their songs. Let us know what you think. And if you have an existing traditional audio business of your own that could benefit from streamlining the recording aspect by moving it to the cloud, get in touch with us. We like making it easier for people to record stuff and work together.

We’ve been hard at work making various enhancements and are happy today to unveil a major code release that brings a much-improved first user experience to help the less-technical folks get started making music.

If you’ve already been using Scratch Audio you may need to kill your cookies to see the improvements but basically the first time you go to record we’ll hand-hold you through the process of each step involved in making your first song with helpful in-line guides like this one:

Additionally we’ve overlaid a quick intro video that plays on first use while the tutorial tracks are downloading in the background. This gives first-time users a clearer picture of what they’re about to do. We’ve also pulled out some of the more advanced features from the main interface and moved them into an options screen with the goal of minimizing anything that could be daunting for the new user.

So how does this affect the advanced people like yourself who already know how to use the tool? It means you’ll soon have more neighbors to collaborate with. We believe making the first user experience a useful & rewarding one (or at least not a frustrating one) is key to building a thriving songwriting community. And lowering the difficulty bar for getting started in music-making is one of our core values.

The other big change you may notice is that you can now zoom in the DAW. This was a heavily-requested feature on our suggestions page and we’re stoked to finally deliver this functionality. This should make it significantly easier to get around your composition while sequencing

There’s a laundry list of other geekish improvements in this release. In no particular order those are:

• Improved UI for the login/create account dialog in the DAW
• More sensible slider controls for volume, pan, zoom, effects, etc. (ie. jumps right to where you click instead of incrementing)
• Fixed a nagging font issue (where sometimes the wrong font would load and make everything look funny)
• Lots of tweaks to html/css/javascript to help improve page load speeds
• New db access layer to drastically reduce # of sql calls per page (basically rocket fuel to make searches and results pages load much faster)
• Improved handling of user avatar images to improve performance
• Some misc code cleanup/refactoring (the code equivalent of cleaning the bathroom)

Lastly we’re excited to now be offering a service for bands who wish to do fully-outsourced remix competitions as a way to promote their music. If you’re a band you can read more and signup for us to run your next remix contest here. Everyone have a safe July 4th and this holiday declare your own independence of desktop recording software

Everybody repeat after me, “Follow da leada leada leada, follow da leada.” That was an annoying but catchy dance tune that was popular when I lived in Ecuador and for some reason it seems appropriate to hum now given the brand new features we just rolled out.

We’re proud to announce the addition of three core social features which dramatically improve the usefulness of Scratch Audio as a music collaboration platform:

• TAGGING: allows you to tag your songs and profile with attributes of your choosing that make it easier to connect with others and make your creations more discoverable. Some examples of useful tags are assigning attributes of: location, language, instrumentation, genre, and even open-ended descriptive tags about what you’re looking for in order to complete a composition.
• FOLLOWING: you can now monitor specific artists and songs and track them as they evolve. Similar to the way the asynchronous follow system of Twitter works you can not only follow others but see who is following you and the artists you follow. This helps you discover & connect with like-minded musicians.
• NOTIFICATIONS: what good is tracking artists and songs if you have no way to be alerted of developments? We implemented a simple notification system that will send you an email alert anytime new activity occurs that’s relevant to you (ie. someone follows you, an artist you track publishes a new song, someone creates a remix of one of your songs or leaves a comment).

These features coupled together make it easier to connect with musicians & producers and to socialize your creations. Other great enhancements we’ve added recently include:

• An improved sorting algorithm modeled after Hacker News that ensures freshest & most popular material rises to the top of both the artists and songs pages (coupled with the FOLLOW capability it makes it possible to truly “follow da leada” at any moment – hence the silly lead-in to this post…)
• Deals with five different loop providers to significantly expand the selection of audio samples in the library.
• Enhanced categorization of samples and drum kits and streamlined searching to make it even easier to find the sounds you need for your song.
• One-click publish to your SoundCloud profile (complementing the existing quick-share publish options to Facebook and Twitter).
• Various fixes and enhancements to the DAW to solve time sync’ing issues and improve overall performance.

If you haven’t used Scratch Audio in awhile, give it another look. It’s quickly evolving to be the easiest way to get your musical ideas out of your head and into a convenient “scratch space” for faster collaboration and discovery with others. Drop us a comment and let us know how you like the new features. And if there are other enhancements you’d like to see add them here so others can vote on them and help triage their prioritization for inclusion.