Site: Mixcloud

by Matt on 25 May 2010

mixcloud.com A site that collects together lots of independent podcasts, radio shows and DJ mixes for you to discover. And gives you the tools to get involved yourself.

More like this

Music reviews

App: Audioboo

Site: Get Some

From the podcast

Pros

No clouds in the sky

It looks ace, some really nice type-led design – never have tracklistings looked so appealing. If you want an alternative take on the music scene, here is a great place to find mixes (and podcasts) put together from all sorts of genres by anyone. There’s also plenty of meta data around each mix to make browsing around nice and easy.

Uploading is a joy. They’ve really thought about the upload form by not making it a traditional form with lots of dull fields. And you can fill out the details as the file uploads in the background. Handy. And there seems to be no limit on the amount you can upload.

They allow you to take away the embeddable media player and put it on your site. Which in itself looks ace (as you can see from our own use of it!) and is dead easy to code with.

It could well be the youtube of audio. It really could. And even if it isn’t, it’s all free, which is bloody brilliant. So what are you waiting for?

Cons

Rain clouds

There’s only really two bugs/odd things - and they certainly aren’t showstoppers - that I can spot:

The episode page looks sweet and is styled really well. It’s just the player isn’t immediately obvious and looks like it could be part of the header. Then when you press play the audio appears in a new window, which is a bit of an odd behaviour.

You get to choose an image for your player if you embed it, which is cool but when you want the player at odd sizes it scales and crops the image weirdly (hence why we’ve gone for plain colours). Would be good to have a default player look.

Comments & social