A substantial amount of SoundCloud listening happens outside of SoundCloud – on blogs, on Facebook, whatever. And when it comes to neatly-organized playlists of music, iTunes, Spotify, and Grooveshark stand out as easier solutions – much easier solutions.
Some of this is apples-and-oranges, and some of it isn’t. But what if you could find, organize, and easily share content from SoundCloud’s vast and massive collection? Enter MyCloudPlayer (mycloudplayers.com), a web-based (and mobile) app that does just that. The idea is simple: MyCloudPlayer lets users search for SoundCloud music (or whatever), and drag selected results into different playlists. Those playlists are by default cloud-enabled, and can be stored or shared across the web just like a typical SoundCloud track.
One question is why you need a third-party app to accomplish this. One reason is that the SoundCloud player itself is great, but the site itself can be a disorganized mess of remixes and odds-and-ends. The same can be said for YouTube, which is why MyCloudPlayer also has a version for that platform as well.
To some extent, SoundCloud and YouTube need to be viewed for the animals that they are. SoundCloud, for example, excels at uploading and sharing remixes, speeches and other sonified bits. And SoundCloud operates on a Creative Commons framework and lets uploaders decide their level of sharing restriction, just like a number of other user-generated content plays. But here’s where things get hairy: SoundCloud is yet-another user-generated beast, which means that lots of closely-licensed, major label content naturally gets caught in its net.
Seems like another murky area, though we had no problem creating a playlist with original songs from The Beatles, Metallica, Gotye, The Black Keys, Michael Jackson, Mumford & Sons, deadmau5, Red Hot Chili Peppers… you get the idea. But what’s worse is that some of these tracks were easily downloadable – in our testing, that included downloadable MP3s of Metallica’s “Leper Messiah” and the Black Keys’ “Lonely Boy”.
The create-and-carry playlist looks something like this.
