Soundcloud alternatives

justsomenerd

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(Not sure if this is the right category for these kinds of posts, hopefully it is.)

So Soundcloud announced that they gonna limit their upload space for free users more starting December 9th. I know a lot of us here who have SC accounts use the free plan so this is somewhat troubling news for many UTAU users. I have been looking for and using SC alternatives myself for a while since I knew I have to deal with the whole limited upload thing in the future eventually, so I figured I start a thread where users could discuss such things and perhaps recommend some sites.

Personaly I have been using Audiomack for a while and I recently tried Audius which I would both recommend so far (though full disclosure Audius is more of a blind rec cause I have only been using it for a day or so). More specific breakdown in the spoiler:

Audius:

Pros:
- No upload limit
- Offers features like 'Artists Pick', where you personally select what tracks you want featured on your profile
- Artist Profile has separate tabs for your uploads and reposts and they show your uploads first. (I know SC has separate tabs for those too but they first show both repost and your tracks first and imho it makes for a somewhat cluttered feed. Plus your tracks can get easily burried in the reposts.)
- In adition to selecting a genre for your music, you can select a mood for it too. I think it's a cute touch
- You can upload whole albums of playlists

Cons:
- UI can be a little unintuitive
- Character limit for descriptions is too low
- Can be slow to load at times (thought that could just be atributed to my internet connection)
- Currently lacks some of the social features of SC like comments and dm's

Audiomack:

Pros:
- No upload limit
- Relatively speedy loading
- Offers options for selling on other sites like I-Tunes - for peeps who make original works this might be useful (I haven't used that so I can't comment on what it's like)
- Nice UI
- Straightforward and easy to use upload process
- Allows for linking Youtube videos with your uploads as it's own button, not sure if it's useful for anyone else but I think it's neat!
- Like Audius, you can upload whole albums or playlists
- Allows you to mark a song as Explicit if it has such content (sorta similar to the mature content filter on deviantart thought I'm not sure as I haven't used it yet.)
- Offers advanced analytics

Cons:

- Search function is not the best - you have to be very percise when searching for something
- Lacks tagging function.

But what are your recommendations? Feel free to leave suggestions! If you can list pros and cons it would be greatly appreciated!
 
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justsomenerd

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Another nice pro regarding Audius that I forgot to mention (I don't seem to be able to edit the main post anymore so I post it in the comments):
You can also filter your main feed as to wether you want to see everything, only uploads or only reposts on your dashboard. This is a very nice feature imho, makes browsing stuff on your dash easier. (Plus I cannot tell you how many times have I missed uploads from artists I follow on SC because it got burried in reposts form other accounts.)
 
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Lystrialle

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I normally am not one to break my silence on this issue, but I feel this is something that cannot be emphasized enough -- despite everything appealing about its UI, Audius is extremely sketchy on the grounds that they run on blockchain and cryptocurrency, and, more damningly, are not transparent about this despite all their aggressive marketing at those falling off SoundCloud.

Describing everything dangerous about anything blockchain-related can't really be summarized accurately in a tl;dr, but I would be extremely wary about anything that associates itself with possibly one of the most unstable and sketchy tech ventures out there, with deep ties to scamming and exploitation, and, again, is not actually advertising this honestly in its setup. Doing a quick Google research into Audius already reveals a ton of media skepticism about the platform they've refused to address.

Moreover, there's been at least one report about it mining the real-life location of someone signing up for it, even when it didn't ask for permission to take that data. If you wish to use it, use it at your own risk.

As for what I can personally recommend, right now the best I can offer is MQube, a Japanese service for which I made a a guide for using and navigating. It is not a perfect solution, and much less a permanent one, as the interface is still in Japanese, and it being independently run means it's prone to some occasional server instability. But it's already been used by Japanese vocalsynth users for more than a year now after the fall of TMBox, and it hits the right range of casual-to-finalized that its users tend to need, so it should be able to tide people over for the time being.
 
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justsomenerd

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First of all thank you for your insight, appreciate the reply however I would like some verifyable and trustworthy sources on that cryptocurrency claim as I could not find any
As for that media scepticism, I only found one verge article discussing it and no offense but I would sooner trust Satan's secretary than The Verge on anything ever.
Pluss you would be hard pressed to find any website that does not collect data to some capacity sadly. It sucks but if I cut ties with every website that does this I would never be online ever.
Lasty while the location setting is very troublesome, it can easily be changed.
In any case while your concen is very much appreciated I cannot get fully behind it but thank you for sharing anyway. It's good to be informed on these things and I don't want to make it seem like I'm not thankfull for your input cause I am. ^^

Also sorry for the garbage formatting it's late where I am and i am somewhat sleep deprived orz
 

Lystrialle

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Source, source, source.
All of them mainstream technology and music news outlets, and literally among the first results that come up on Google upon even searching Audius's name (definitely a far cry from just The Verge).

The problem is not the fact they take data -- you are correct in that many companies do this -- but the problem is that they are already mining this data from people and displaying it by default without their permission, and this is a service being recommended to a community where there are a lot of people under 18.

And, again, the issue is that they are not transparent about the fact that they're connected to a tech industry infamous for exploiting people by offering them industry freedom while inducting them into a scam. All of these factors are things that personally I find very troubling to see marketed outright to a community where a lot of our members are high school age and shouldn't be subject to a risk like this. It'd be one thing if people were knowingly going into this knowing the risks -- and there are many reasons one might still consider it -- but it is very troubling that so many people are taking their aggressive marketing at face value and relatively unaware of what it entails.
 
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justsomenerd

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I see hmm.
For some reason when I googled it nowhere did those articles show up amd I was quite a few pages deep. Maybe a regional thing. Google is weird.
This is a little troublesome. Welp.
I still recommend the other site I mentioned, Audiomack. It has a lot of the same functionalitied as Soundcloud + no time limit. I might look at that Mqube (is that what it's called?) I keep seeing mentioned thought a lack of an english ui is a little disheartening.
Its sad that Audius is like that. I might keep it for a little while as an emergency solution but I was really hoping it would work out :sad:
Audiomack is great and in fact I prefer it but like i don't think anyone in the vocalsynth community uses it which is sad.
Thank you for your time and sorry for the inconvenience.
 

Hentai

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I saw some enterprising users had started using the #UTAU and #Vocaloid tags on MixCloud as far back as 5 years ago. Its a platform mainly popular with DJs but its incredibly mature, has a lot of social & discovery features, along with a lot of feature parity (except direct downloads) with SoundCloud. It has been around a long time so its a bit more of a known entity than these new blockchain-powered sites but with SoundCloud committing seppuku, who knows how sustainable it is before it gets hit with the same legal and profitability issues if it ever goes mainstream.
 

Hentai

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Some people on Twitter have suggested AudioMack. It has been around for a number of years but doesn't have a proven monetization model. There are no premium accounts, which can be a good or bad thing, as we don't know how sustainable it is, but overall it is a fully-featured site and already a lot of UTAU/Vocaloid users have populated it with relevant content. The only downside is there is no taxonomy or tagging and search does not scan descriptions, so you will have to be very careful filling out the various metadata fields on upload to aid discoverability.