New ideas for online sound recording and distribution

This is a guest blog by Ben Fawkes, co-founder of SoundCloud, a Berlin-based tech company offering audio services which are beginning to be used by journalists.

During the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, reviewers from Time Out London used the SoundCloud iPhone app to record mini-reviews of the hundreds of shows they were watching. These were added to a player on SoundCloud and embedded on their site (below).

Meanwhile, TechCrunch used SoundCloud to post a recording of Yahoo's shareholder meeting. And All Things Digital recorded part of Oracle's earnings conference call.

These are just some of the recent uses by journalists for SoundCloud technology. It lets you post a simple piece of sound, record and share interviews across the web and crowdsource audio from your audience.

For interviewing and reporting from the field, it captures and distributes content on-the-fly, either straight to your blog or website or to your editor's inbox - either recorded via our site or using our iPhone or Android apps.

Colleagues back in the office can then take the embeddable player to distribute it right away - either to your own site, or shared on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Gathering audio from your audience can be done in a variety of ways - using the iPhone or Android apps, or a SoundCloud DropBox, allowing people to record a message directly in the browser.

The DropBox let people to submit sounds to you: you can upload audio directly to a user for review but there is also a record button allowing you to record directly in the browser straight to the user's account.

The NPR show All Songs Considered call on their listeners to record messages by embedding the DropBox widget on their site. Listeners click on the widget and are taken to the All Songs Considered account where they can record and upload directly for use in the show.

Our iPhone and Android apps can both gather audio and make an audio map, plotting sounds to locations.

So if you are interviewing someone during a conference or a citywide festival you can set the location, adding extra context to the interview. The recording locaton is marked on a map, providing a central resource for people to submit audio plot locations.

We recently set one up for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - for use by comedians, to visitors, journalists and venues, all recording audio and plotting it to their exact location

Finally, we're working on an experimental SoundCloud Labs product, Takequestions.com which provides a way for fans, followers or friends to ask you questions - which we think could be a great way for journalists to talk to their audience.

And for audience members without access to the internet or a smartphone, SoundCloud has an Importer, with three phone numbers (currently German, U.S and U.K numbers available) where people can leave a message, which will then get uploaded to your account.