For such an established service, SoundCloud surprising is lacking in several areas. For reasons I discuss below, SoundCloud is a poor choice for a podcasting platform.
As it turns out, this is a blog post on a misadventure…
Just one account per SoundCloud profile
You can’t have multiple SoundCloud logins which can all manage a shared profile. You’re stuck with a single login – and shared passwords.
https://soundcloudcommunity.com/trust-safety-229932/multiple-accounts-6685159
API is dead
Literally. The docs are there, but API keys cannot be registered at all.
The google form to request an API key has been closed for over half a year now. You can’t make changes to existing API registrations either. Too much abuse, and no solution apparently. (Apparently there are some people offering services to ‘fake’ play/like stats … ruining it for everyone else)
- No bulk uploads
- No bulk downloads / data exporting
No default permission settings
If you want to enable downloads for all your tracks, you need to do it for every track upload. Same goes for disabling comments or any other permission.
Fortunately this is compensated by the bulk permission edit feature!
Bulk updates don’t always work
Often, a popup will appear asking you to retry a bulk action because it failed for some tracks (like bulk editing permissions, or bulk changing artwork). The retry button works, but still a strange thing to happen.
Sometime, as you bulk upload a bunch of MP3s, the ‘save’ button works but fails on the frontend – so subsequent ‘save’ button clicks log in the js console that the permalink/uid has already been taken. Hmmm..
Uploader is buggy
- Unstable internet connections midway will leave bulk uploads in an inconsistent state. In my case, this is a huge problem when uploading 40 tracks at a time. In one attempt (we) ended up with tracks uploaded 3x times – which is terribly tedious to fix as there is no bulk delete.
- Sometimes the save button will NOT appear after uploading.
Bulk track and playlist management
Can be painful once you’ve uploaded hundreds of tracks. No search filtering. No sorting. I’d say this alone is a big showstopper for professionals.
For us, the soundcloud uploader screwed up (!??) and we ended up with a couple hundred duplicates – a pain to delete each duplicate one by one (D: D:).
Bulk track and playlist management
Hitting the escape key will close a modal dialog, without user confirmation. Sucks when you’re midway editing 50+ tracks in a playlist (due to the buggy uploader) !!!
Playlists are always shown in reverse chronological order
I don’t understand why this is even a thing. For podcasters, this sucks because the embedded widget will always show the oldest track first, with the big play button. Wouldn’t listeners expect that latest most recent podcast to be on the top?
Uploading tracks never finish, keep restarting
In my case, the mp3 uploads to 100%, but then restarts at 0%. Possibly a metadata parsing fail.
Wipe meta and re-upload?? Change browser??
Site downtime
Devoops is hard. Just as I was integrating SoundCloud widgets into a website when their whole site “stopped working” – profile pages came up as ‘user not found’, I kept getting logged out, and lots of weird stuff. Turned out that the site itself was having big issues, and I was one of the first ones affected – even before the outage made it to status.soundcloud.com!
Just about all the above issues can be fixed, but aren’t. As a paying customer, that really is a bummer.
SoundCloud may not be around in the long term, so the plan is to ride it out for now and switch in the future.
At least there’s the value of the subscription fee and unlimited uploads going for it.
Helpful:
- Keep a tab of SC open in the background, so when you refresh the active tab with SC it won’t autoplay
- https://superuser.com/questions/427166/how-to-replace-a-links-text-with-the-absolute-href-url
- Stylish to collapse track paddings to ease bulk drag and drop
- Firefox find regex…