Sharing To SoundCloud
Introduction
With social media sharing at an all time high, many websites are offering ways for artists to share their work to the world, one website in particular which has taken the foreground in allowing you to share your sounds is ‘SoundCloud’.
SoundCloud was founded in 2007 by sound designer Alex Ljung and Eric Wahforss, initially desgined as a tool for musicians to send recordings to each other, it quickly evolved into a much larger platform for artists to distribute their tracks. If you have an account already then great, if not, head over there now and create one for free.
With Pro Tools being one of the most recognised pieces of sound production software and SoundCloud one of the most popular ways for artists to distribute their work, shouldn’t the two work together….
Well thankfully in Pro Tools 10 the option is available to share your mixes directly to SoundCloud without the hassle of having to log in and out of a bulk load of websites, let’s take a look.
Logging In
First things first, you need to associate your SoundCloud account with Pro Tools, or of course create one if you are new to the website. An account can be created directly from SoundCloud’s own website but for the purposes of this tutorial, we will show you how to make one directy from Pro Tools itself.
To login, or if necessary create an account, simply open Pro Tools and select ‘Login To SoundCloud’ from the Setup > Connect To… menu, as shown below.
Sharing To SoundCloud
So now you’re all logged in, let’s look at sharing your mixes directly from Pro Tools.
Let’s start with sharing your bounces, from the menus at the top of Pro Tools, navigate to File > Bounce To > Disk as you would when coming to bounce down your sessions any other time.
You will notice that at the bottom of the bounce dialogue window is a drop down box labelled ‘Share With:’.
Note: The bounce format will need to be set to either Mono (Summed), or Interleaved for you to be able to share with SoundCloud.
Simply choose SoundCloud from the box and click Bounce as you would normally, except this time not only will you be presented with a box asking where you would like to locally save your mix, you will also be presented with a share dialog window asking for the details to be displayed on your SoundCloud.
We will look at that SoundCloud sharing window in the next section but let’s first look at some of the other elements of your session which you can share to SoundCloud.
Sharing Clips
You can share specific clips from within your sessions in one of two ways, by either selecting the clip from the clip list and selecting ‘Export Clips as Files’ from the clip menu.
You will then be presented with the ‘Export Selected‘ window, which doesn’t look too dissimilar to the bounce dialog window, again simply check the ‘Share to SoundCloud‘ box and then click Export from which you will be presented with a window asking where you would like to save the file locally and another asking you for the SoundCloud sharing options which we will look at next.
Sharing Window
The ‘Share with SoundCloud’ sharing window allows you associate various pieces of information to be displayed alongside your audio file on SoundCloud, while the window is pretty self explanitory, let’s have a look into what each of the fields mean.
Title
Pretty simple, this will be the title of the file which is displayed online.
Description
Up to you what you put in this field (if anything), I quite like to add a few comments referring to which DAW I used for the production, and perhaps list any plug-ins which have been used in special ways etc…
License
More for the websites side of making sure no copyright infringements are occuring, you will need to select an option from this dropdown list to state the licensing for the file you are uploading.
Type
Made simple by another dropdown list, this will allow you chose your audio files type such as original or remix.
Downloadable
This checkbox will decide whether the file can be downloaded by other users, if the box is left unchecked then users will only be able to stream the file.
Genre
Simply choose a genre which is most appropriate to your file, this has been left as a text box so you can put in whatever genre you can think of.
Tags
This section allows you to associate whichever tags you like with your file, simply separate your tags with spaces. Tags which feature multiple words should be written between quotemarks as well as the usual space.
Private Track
As you have no doubt guessed already, this option keeps your track private to only those you specify, when you select this option you will be asked for the email addresses of those who you wish to be able to hear your track, all email addresses should be separated with commas.
Notify
You will see one final checkbox at the bottom of the window labelled ‘Show notification when upload is complete’, and as it states, you will receive an on-screen notification displaying the link to the file on SoundClouds website.
Note: You can see the upload progess using the Task Manager window which can be found at Window > Task Manager.
Final Words
So next time you’ve finished the mix of your next hit, don’t forget to keep an eye out for that little checkbox at the bottom of your bounce window to ensure you music reaches the masses!
If you have had success from using SoundCloud to distribute your music or have simply learnt something new from this tutorial, please do drop us a message below or say hi on Twitter!
