SoundCloud has only been around for a short time (Since 2007) but has become one of the best known ways of distributing both a streamable and downloadable version of your tracks. Thanks to a few of SoundCloud's features it makes the site a good choice for those of you who want to run your own remix contest.

We are regularly seeing remix contest organizers using SoundCloud services as the foundation of running their remix contest. This post is to give people an idea of what SoundCloud can offer to help run a remix contest and to also a review of SoundCloud's services when using it to run a remix contest.

Uploading the Remix Stems
Uploading on SoundCloud is probably one of the easiest sites I have ever uploaded anything to, so there no problems in that department for both you and the people entering your remix contest. SoundCloud supports the uploading of AIFF, WAVE, FLAC, OGG, MP3 and AAC files, our remix stems are most likely going to be in WAVE format.

SoundCloud allows you to create a set and group your remix stems together and then create a widget which holds each of these remix stems displayed in a single unit. This can be pasted straight into your remix contest page by using the Share option within SoundCloud, making the set ready for entrants to download your stems from.

There is just two problems at the moment with this, firstly it can be a bit of a pain for the entrant to download your stems because each file needs to be downloaded individually, if you had 20 stems (and some remix contests do) each entrant will be there for a time clicking and downloading each stem. It would be great if SoundCloud could implement a way to download a whole set in one go.

Secondly free accounts are limited to 100 downloads of each track. This can be a problem as many remix contests will break this limit pretty quickly (especially once we list a contest here on Remix Comps), but that is easily solved by signing up for a paid for account (You can get an account for €9 a month which allows for unlimited downloads), more than enough time to run your remix contest and not a bad price too.

Receiving Remix Entries
SoundCloud offers an additional feature with every account that they call a 'DropBox'. This allows people to send you tracks, you get an email when someone uploads and the track gets added to your account under 'Tracks from Others'. You also get a nifty looking button which you can paste straight on to your remix contest's page, allowing you to receive your remix contest entries in an easy way (Here's an example).

Send me your track The benefits of the Dropbox make it is easier for your contest entrants to upload their entry as opposed to the more traditional email way and it is a lot safer for entrants as entries can get lost or fill up and email inbox pretty quickly. Entries are hidden from others (if you don't want entries on display) and you can download them too. SoundCloud also collects the email address of the entrant and allows you to message them through their interface. The files added to your DropBox don't seem to get added to a free account's quota of 120 minutes of audio, so it seems to be the perfect (and free) solution for receiving your entries.

Displaying Remix Entries
SoundCloud also has a Groups feature and anyone can create their own group. This feature could be used to receive entries too, allowing you to create a small remix contest community for your contest (as there is a discussion page). This also allow entrants to get feedback on their entries and see what others are up to.

Getting People to Enter
Within the Forums on SoundCloud they have now setup a special forum for posting details about your remix contests, so once you've created a remix contest on SoundCloud, you can then advertise it too.

Also don't forget to submit it to us here too so we can direct even more remixers to your contest.

Our Verdict on SoundCloud for Remix Contests
SoundCloud is good and is pretty decent for those of you who want to run a remix contest and have little knowledge of web hosting as it is easy to use. Using SoundCloud for Remix Stem hosting is not as good as it could be (as mentioned above), but then again it wasn't specifically designed for that. Overall SoundCloud is a good option for running a remix contest especially with the DropBox feature to receive entries but for the time being it is probably better to use your own web hosting or a free file hosting for your remix stems as you can zip them up too.

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