One of my friends turned me on to SoundCloud a couple months ago, but I never really messed around with it.  At first it wasn't open to the public, so I didn't get much value out of it.  But a few days ago SoundCloud finally opened up to the world, so I'm giving it another look.

At first glance SoundCloud seems a sort of "me too" when it comes to music hosting.  It allows artists to upload their music so other people on the site can discover it.  But there are a few things that makes SoundCloud cool.  One is the concept of the DropBox.  Let's say you and your friend are on SoundCloud, and you find a cool song you want him to hear.  Just drop it in his DropBox, sort of like a "song email" without clogging up your friend's email.  My friend could send me music in the same way through my DropBox.  But they've also just come out with a couple nice Facebook apps that exposes SoundCloud content to folks on Facebook.  There's the DropBox app, which is basically the same functionality as the SoundCloud DropBox, but on Facebook- my friends could drop music in my box for me to hear.  Going the other way there's the SoundCloud Player Facebook app, where I could drop music into the player and folks on Facebook would have access to it.

So yes, this sounds like any other player.  An additional fun piece of functionality makes using SoundCloud cool: SoundCloud provides a waveform display of the song itself, and allows users to place "time-based" comments within the timeline of the song.  Usually it could be something as simple as "I love this part".  But artists could also use it to give fans additional insight into the song.

Taken as a whole, SoundCloud seems pretty cool, and the combination of the DropBox feature and in-line commenting could make SoundCloud especially useful for long-distance collaboration.

I think I'll try it out for a while and see if it sticks.  By the way, I'm at http://www.soundcloud.com/jamesolszewski.