SoundCloud Hopes Its Slick Redesign Will ‘Unmute the Web’
Ljung (left) and Wahlforss demonstrate the new SoundCloud features at the company's San Francisco office.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired
SAN FRANCISCO — SoundCloud, the online music-streaming platform and de facto music label for independent artists trying to share their tunes efficiently, announced a complete redesign of its service Wednesday, in what the Berlin-based company called an attempt to “unmute the web.”
The new version of SoundCloud, which the company called “The Next SoundCloud” and launched in private beta Wednesday, offers four new or improved features to the online music platform. Those include a sleeker player (improving on SoundCloud’s signature waveform design), the ability to play sounds continuously and navigate away from a particular track to continue searching the site without the audio stopping, improved search algorithms and tools, and the ability to repost audio in a way very similar to the “reblog” feature on Tumblr.
The improvements, SoundCloud co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung said, were an attempt to make the web more audio-friendly.
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Apocalypse Prep: How to Preserve Food Without a Fridge
Photo: Jihyun Ryou
When you bring food home from a grocery store, chances are you toss it in the fridge. Ever stop to wonder if that's your best move? People managed to store perishables before the era of refrigeration, and if you're imagining a root cellar full of cans and preserves, you're only partially right.
Designer Jihyun Ryou has made it her mission to, er, preserve some of those old methods of preserving food, designing this minimalist system for the modern kitchen."We hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator," says Rhyou. "We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it."
Are you really treating your food badly when you pop it in the fridge? Well, you're sealing it in a cold box with a bunch of other food -- all of it off-gassing and slowly decomposing. Each item reacts to the chemical composition of the other items, and to the environment itself....
