We removed one log statement from a service’s hot path this week. Its 99th-percentile response latency fell from a steady to , and CPU… We removed one log statement from a service’s hot path this week. Its 99th-percentile response latency fell from a steady ~48ms to ~18ms , and CPU usage dropped by about the same factor. The cleanest way to see it: before the change, p99 never went below 40ms at a

Last year, SoundCloud upgraded its AAC encoder for the first time in over a decade. The new one (Fraunhofer’s libfdk_aac) delivers higher perceptual audio quality across every metric we track. But if you look at a spectrogram, you may notice something unexpected. Here’s the scenario: you upload a lossless master. You download your track from SoundCloud and open it in a spectrum analyser. There’s a

In May we opened self-service app registration for Artist Pro subscribers. That fixed the browser flow. Two requests kept coming up anyway: can I do this from the terminal? and where is the OpenAPI file? Here is what we shipped. Register from the terminal Not everyone wants to fill in a web form. If you live in a shell , or you are wiring up an agent that expects shell steps, we added sc-api-auth.

Have you ever had a brilliant idea for a music app, a custom playlist curator, or a unique way to discover underground tracks on SoundCloud, but lacked the programming skills to actually build it? If so, your time has officially come. Thanks to the rise of “vibe coding,” the barrier between having a great idea and launching a working app has completely vanished. At SoundCloud, we want to empower e

At SoundCloud, we’re always looking for ways to improve the listening experience for our creators, partners, and listeners. One of the biggest improvements we can make is at the very core: the audio streams themselves. Over the years, our API has returned a set of streaming URLs based on MP3 and Opus formats. While these formats served us well, it’s time to modernize. To provide higher quality, mo

To all developers using SoundCloud’s public API — we’re introducing an important change that will affect how you reference resources like tracks, playlists, users and comments. 🧠 What’s Changing? SoundCloud’s resource identifiers (id) have always been numeric. As the platform grows, some of these numbers will soon exceed the maximum value of a 32-bit integer. To ensure forward compatibility and pr

A while ago we made an improvement to how track and artist information is displayed on SoundCloud, making it clearer and easier to understand. Previously, it could be confusing when content wasn’t directly uploaded by the artist. One example might be tracks that are coming in as official label content. Another one would be artists collaborating. This often lead to long track titles containing arti

tl;dr: If your app doesn’t store SoundCloud access tokens outside of the context of a user’s client (i.e. a database) the following should not affect you. There will be upcoming changes to Access Tokens important for third parties integrated with SoundCloud. Access tokens were previously dispensed as opaque strings and going forward will be transitioning to a JWT format. Ideally, clients should no

Earlier this year, we updated our API Guide to let developers know that SoundCloud authentication is now operating on the OAuth 2.1 protocol, a popular open standard used by many API providers. This change needed to be made to ensure that we are staying up-to-date in maintaining the highest level of security possible to protect our platform from potential bad actors. As a result, we must ask that

Large Screen Devices - The New Frontier SoundCloud large screen optimized Recently, the Android team at SoundCloud took on a project to… Large Screen Devices - The New Frontier Recently, the Android team at SoundCloud took on a project to optimize the Android app for large screen devices. With the increasing use of devices like tablets, foldables, and Chromebooks, we decided to provide better supp

We’re working on improving our API offering. In order to do that, a few changes are coming: We need to revoke access for some of you with inactive apps . We’ve reached out directly to those who will be affected via email and we’re working to mitigate impact where we can. We need to do this for two reasons: Recently, we haven’t been able to provide developers with the level of support that you dese

I recently celebrated my one year anniversary as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) trainee at SoundCloud. Looking back, I had very little idea of what I was getting into. I studied politics, and had done various teaching and translating jobs over the years before deciding to learn programming. Now I had a coding bootcamp under my belt, but no SRE experience. That said, I was drawn to the idea o

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. We’ll be updating this blog regularly as we actively work to improve the SoundCloud experience for our users, and we’re so excited to share these improvements with everyone. Here are our most recent updates across iOS and Android as of 11 November 2022. New Creator

In an earlier blog post , we talked about how we changed the interview process during remote working as a way of improving our recruiting efforts. In this post, we’ll talk about the training process we defined for the Bar Raiser interview. The Bar Raiser interview is a critical part of the final round of engineering interviews at SoundCloud, and it’s focused on increasing the quality of hiring, wh

We recently made updates to our SoundCloud iOS and Android apps to address key user experience (UX) fixes according to user feedback. We’ll be updating this blog regularly as we actively work to improve the SoundCloud experience for our users, and we’re so excited to share these improvements with everyone. Here are our most recent updates across iOS and Android as of 4 October 2022. Track Cell Siz

The SoundCloud Android app recently got a significant makeover: a “new year, new me” type of thing. Our remarkable design team and outstanding engineers worked together to revamp the way we display all kinds of images in the app, and I’m about to take you behind the scenes on this “glow-up” journey. A Peek at the UI First, here’s a look at the user interface (UI). We went from the old design: To t

We’ve seen considerable adoption of our internal humane registry, Services Directory , since we sanitized ownership definition and introduced an easier-to-use user interface (UI) to our development infrastructure. Namely, managing backend feature toggles (or as we call them, rollouts ) and visualizing interservice dependencies has been helpful in bringing engineering managers, product managers, an

SoundCloud has a variety of resource groups, and one such group is called Women in Engineering, or WINE. The mission statement of the group — which is open to people of all genders — is to work “on initiatives to attract and ensure an environment for women to thrive within Engineering at SoundCloud and in the industry.” This is accomplished in a variety of ways — from hosting monthly events like m

The first step to any code review is understanding what the code does and why. Although the author is by far the most qualified person to answer these questions, all too often, the reviewer is left to answer them on their own. With no pull request (PR) description, reviewers need to assess changes with only the title and, at best, some kind of tracker ticket for context — and let’s be real, the ti

I’m a backend developer who worked extensively writing code in Golang before joining SoundCloud. SoundCloud mostly uses Scala for its microservices , so when I joined, it was important to learn it. As I was new to the language, I faced some challenges going from knowing nothing to becoming skilled at writing code in Scala. This blog post will cover how I kickstarted the learning process, what reso