New iTunes Plugin

We’ve been working hard to make our iTunes plugin more stable and faster. We released a new version this morning that addresses many of these issues. Specifically:

• If you’re connected to an iPod, this version will no longer hang or freeze your iTunes. One known issues is that if you’re syncing your iPod and try to go into Qloud, we have to wait for that’s done before loading the tracks and tags. You should see a message window pop up telling you this too.
• Displaying all tracks in the qloud plugin view. We’ve changed how we display this so the plugin is much faster to display tracks - especially for users with a large library.
• Many, many small bugs such as:
• we now correctly display ampersands
• Removing a tag always works now. It didn’t before if the track had a apostrophe in it.
• Scrolling in the qloud view is much smoother
• Popular tags are always displayed now (no more little “box”)
• Adding tracks does not cause any problems (it used to for some users)

As always, thanks for all your comments and keep ‘em coming. We need to know about any problems, your suggestions and things you like.
You should be prompted to download the new version when you startup iTunes. Or, if you don’t have the plug, you can download it here.

Widgets, More Ways to Search, and Fixes - An Update

We’ve just pushed out our latest release which has some really cool stuff in it. Thanks to all of you for your feedback. Some of the new items:

We now have blog and MySpace widgets. If you want to put your list of tracks or your friends’ tracks on your MySpace page or your blog, you now can with Qloud. Any track search you do, whether for top tracks played in Brazil or your girlfriend’s top tracks tagged “stupid,” can now be made into a flash widget. If you’re looking for a music widget, these are the best available. (note: you must be logged in to do this). Or, if you don’t want a list of tracks, we’ve added our first badge which you can get on our download page. This is just an image you can put on your blog to promote Qloud.

There are now more & better ways to search on Qloud:

• Want to find what people are listening to in your city? You used to have to enter a zip code in the refine results area to find this info, we’ve now added a city dropdown list to make it easy. We did the top 50 metro areas in the US. If you don’t find your city there, you can still search by zip code. You can also still search by country as before.
• Want to find music released in the 80’s? Or music just from 2006, there’s now an area where you can search by tracks release dates. For instance, you can find tracks released after 1886 and before 1988 if you want to find the final years of hair rock.
• We also have added label search. This is just our first iteration of this, but you can now search for tracks by any label - either a major label or independent. For example, if you want to search for the top played tracks on Jack Johnson’s Brushfire label that have been release in 2006, you can! Here’s the page with those search results.

We also have done many little fixes such adding wikipedia information on artist pages, making user’s homepages linkable, playing 30 second clips in WMA on Mac’s instead of Real, adding a link to your user page from the first search page, and many many more…

As always, please keep sending us feedback. We welcome and appreciate any commetns you might have. In fact, several of the items in this update came striaght from you. So, keep ‘em coming!

Enjoy and have a good weekend -

We’re Live!

As you may know, we launched Qloud yesterday and it’s been a crazy 48 hours. The response to the idea and the site has been very positive. We were first reported (here) at GigaOm which had a good review by their journalist Liz Gannes. Then we were reviewed by Mashable (here) which got into all the features of our site and nailed what our service does. One quote from them:

It’s a neat service that looks incredibly slick, although the interface takes a lot of getting used to - I constantly forget to clear my old search before conducting a new one. That said, I’m verging on the side of liking Qloud: it’s still rough, but the intention is there.

As the post mentioned, we’re still rough. Here at Qloud, we believe in adage launch early and release often. So, while we know there are some bugs and other items are not-intuitive, we are fixing them fast.

Some people have had issues with the plugin. There are several items we’re hearing about:

• First, there’s a problem when you switch between 6 and 7. Second, iTunes hangs when starting and loading the library. Both of these have been fixed and the next release of the plugin won’t have these issues.
• A third issue is that when using the qloud view there’s a problem with the resolution of your screen. This is due to your visualizer being set to full screen or anything other than actual size. Future versions of our plugin will set this automatically.
• Some people have mentioned that they can’t register using the plugin’s installer. This will be fixed in the next day or two. In the meantime, please register through the browser and then download the plug-in.
• Finally, a few have reported that there is just random crashing occuring. This is troubling and we’re doing everything we can to ensure that this plugin is SOLID.

So, keep a look out for future releases for improvements and remember that your feedback is the reason why we’ve released beta software even though it’s not completely baked — so we can hear what you like and what needs to be improved.

Qloud, Launch and the West Side Cafe

For me, Qloud and our launch today are all about the West Side Cafe.

I live in Frederick, MD, and the West Side Cafe is the place in my town that, at least in my mind, brings in the best, most creative, most entertaining music. I try to go there as much as I can. And I’m regularly blown away by how wonderful the acts (like Chuck E Costa, Mark McKay, or Brennen Leigh) are that come. God bless them.

The West Side is tiny; the acts can’t get much of any money from there. Few have signed with any big labels yet. But many are every bit as good (or even better) than the best artists played on the radio, topping the charts, and running big nation-wide tours.

I find few things more ecstatic than discovering new music. I can’t get enough of it, however: quickly my new favorite artist becomes the artist I’ve listened too way too much. And I grow tired of my music library, thirsting for something new again. So I go back to the West Side when I can and hope to run into another good act.

Now we all have West Side Cafes and good acts that we’ve all heard. And, unlike the past, the music they make is all just a few clicks away. That’s the potential for today’s era of digital music: there’s no barrier between the listener and the music. It’s all right there.

But that potential still has gone unrealized, because, while there’s that mountain now of available music, listeners still need to find the gems among all of that stone. And, further complicating the matter (and extending the metaphor), one man’s diamond is another man’s limestone. [not sure about this whole piece]

What if, however, we could join together the collective wisdom of all of our listening experiences—be it our latest West Side discovery or an old mega-hit from Led Zeppelin that deserves another play? And extract from the wisdom just the pieces most relevant to our personal tastes? That’s what we’re trying to do at Qloud.

How do we do it? Well, that can be the subject of other, more techie posts. And, of course, for the end-user, the “how” does not matter. But here’s the “what,” the bottom line: Qloud provides super-accurate music search. “Search” is important because the search user experience—its simplicity and immediacy—has proven to be the preferred mode of discovery. And the “accurate” is the magic: the eureka moment when users delight in finding just what they’re looking for.

So today I have two-fold excitement: excitement about launching this service and the adventure that operating it and growing it will provide; and excitement about using this service and having others use the service. There’s so much great music out there and it doesn’t require airtime on MTV or a big contract to make it so. I look forward to discovering your West Side acts. I hope that you like mine.

Sooner than later everyone’s music experience is going to better. Each of us will be listening to the music best suited for our tastes, whether the artist is triple platinum or has 5 coffee house gigs under its belt. We look forward to being part of making that happen.

Getting RSS Feeds of Your Friend’s Music

On Qloud, you can receive RSS or email updates from any channel.  Channels can be any saved search.  So, one channel i created was: The 30 Most Played tracks by my friends in the past 30 days.  I then subscribed to the channel in my news reader (Google’s new reader - which is great) and get a daily update of music my friends are listening to the most.

Each track in each post has a play button which immediately takes me to a page which begins auto-playing the track. It works great and today i found a few tunes that i would have never known about before thanks to a friend of mine in NY and another in Denver.  It’s a great way to get a daily dose of good tunes.  Check it out….