My Cloud Player Turns SoundCloud Into A Music Player App
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
For some music fans, SoundCloud is a panacea. From the latest EDM mixes to the latest pre-release “leaks,” SoundCloud hosts a crazy breadth of musical content. However, it was designed more for uploading and sharing than pure music consumption. Much like SXSW, SoundCloud was originally designed for music creators and industry types, but music fans have gravitated to it in droves.
If you are a SoundCloud devotee from the fan side, as opposed to from the artist side, and you use an Android, we’re hard pressed to think of a reason that you wouldn’t download and install My Cloud Player now. In a nutshell: It turns SoundCloud into a full-fledged music player app for Android.
In addition to full access to everything on SoundCloud (search, your own personal dashboard, your follows and followings, etc.) you get most of what you’d expect from a straight-up music player — equalizer, sleep timer, play queue, playlist creation, Last.fm and Google+ scrobbling, the ability to download tracks to store them locally, and so on.
My Cloud Player developer Gorancho Cucko Sirkarovski, who has the best name of anyone we’ve corresponded with today, tells Evolver.fm that his highly-rated app solves several problems with SoundCloud on Android.
“First, [the] SoundCloud app uses lots of CPU while playing — its not created to be an app for playing music,” said Sirkarovski. “You can check the comments on Google Play, lots of people are complaining about this… next thing is random/shuffle play, again, SoundCloud is not a player app. In my app you can load any list (dashboard, stream tracks, favorites, sets, playlists [created on mycloudplayers.com] and play it. The interface is very easy to use, and the app is very fast.”
Does it respect the artists wish with respect to downloads?
When you post a track on SC you can elect not to allow download and only allow streaming. An app that hacks this and allows downloads is not to be supported for two main reasons
1) You are flipping the bird at the artist’s wishes
2) When SC streams audio, it does so at a very low bitrate, ultra-processed and compressed. This low quality file is what you will download.
Let’s hope this app plays nice
It does. But that’s silly anyway, the control whether you save the content you downloaded should be firmly in the users hands.