The tool was conceived for Soundcloud advocate Imogen Heap at a Music Hack Day in January, and her well-established trial is at ask.imogenheap.com. The invite-only beta version (ask, and you may receive) is also being used by
Radio One's DJ Nihal, anti-folk heroes Herman Dune and Fenech-Soler, the French electropop band.
Takes Questions gives each user a customisable subdomain on takesquestions.com and only answered questions are published, which is a simple and rather clever solution to moderating.
Expanding its range of tools through the API is part of a bigger vision for Soundcloud, said Dave Haynes, vice president of business development. "We've always wanted Soundcloud to be a platform for audio like Flickr is for photos, Twitter is for messaging and YouTube is for video. Audio got left behind a bit on the web and it was much easier to record and play video, but we want Soundcloud to make it that easy to use audio."
While Soundcloud is just one of an explosion of audio and 'social audio' apps - not least Audioboo - the developer community is an important part of expanding Soundcloud.
"Takes Questions was built by our in-house devs, but there's a bigger conversations around Soundcloud in the developer community and Soundcloud is built into music-creation tools like Korg's iMS20." That iPad app lets users create music and share it through Soundcloud, and is one of 150 apps in Soundcloud's app gallery.
Soundcloud is a slick and very compelling tool that has built a strong following among musicians, but has been careful to describe itself as an audio, rather than music platform from the outset so that it has room to grow. I discovered Soundcloud when I needed an audio version of YouTube to embed some audio on our site, and I've still yet to find a better looking or more stable embeddable tool. What more can you ask?
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