Chris Randall (Audio Damage, Micronaut) & Mark Beeson have announced a new audio hosting that is a SoundCloud alternative, targeting audio professionals.
“Soundcloud is for musicians with fans,” says Randall. “Octave is for musicians with clients.”
Here’s what they have to say about Octave:
Octave is an audio hosting service for professionals, with the tools you need to store, embed, play, and share your sound. Just upload your files, and they’re ready to play. Everywhere. Instantly.
From embedding songs in your social media services and on your website to sharing private tracks with labels and collaborators, Octave is everything you want, without the nonsense. No advertising. No ridiculous timeline comments. No private message spam. Just audio, when you need it, where you need it.
Welcome to the future.
With redundant cloud-based storage that hooks in to your Dropbox and Google Drive accounts, your files are safe as a very safe thing can be. And our encoding technology, we don’t even. No waiting for “processing”, and no faceless algorithms to flag your own tracks as copyright violations. The lightning-quick Octave encoding process happens while you upload, and your files are ready to play, share, and download as soon as they’re in our system. The only speed limit is your connection.
Here’s a sample embed:
Listen to the album “many moons” by micronaut.
Two plans are available: Octave for Artists and Octave for Labels.
The Artists plan is priced at US $20/month and offers:
- Unlimited uploads and storage of your tracks.
- Unlimited albums.
- Unlimited shares.
- Unlimited plays.
Label plans are quoted, based on usage.
See the Octave site for details. If you’ve used Octave, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!
For 20 dollars a year i would go for a minimum of 12 hours online music. 20 dollars a month is a missed opportunity for many unfortunately
So from the description, I gather that it’s Soundcloud *less* a ton of features that I like. That’s not a great sales pitch :/
For 20 dollars a year I can put my music on all online platforms Spotify iTunes google play and another 150 platforms…. DISTROKID…
20 dollars per month… next
There’s lots of things about Soundcloud that could be improved upon but this pitch sucks: “we built a Soundcloud with zero social features and charge more than twice as much”.
” $20 per month or $200 per year ” If it smells like fish, it’s fish. For that price, one could host their own site.
i think thats the point. no social stuff, no advertising, better sound. its not for people looking to share their music and gain followers, its for people looking for solid audio hosting. niche product.
Thank you! Everyone bitching about the price is obviously missing the point. This is for musicians that have a career in music, not hobbyist.
Do you make your $$ from music? Octave is for you.
Do you make beats from your bedroom for fun? Keep on soundclouding.
All of the social features on soundcloud do absolutely nothing for promoting your music to a serious business client.
I’m a professional musician. I would not pay $20 a month for this service.
We already have Bandcamp as an easy alternative to thesocial media aspect of Soundcloud. What we need is a service that streams at a higher bitrate. Does anyone know what the bitrate for this service is?
My guess is 128-192kbps. For 20/month, it’s a joke. Next!
Interesting but embedding doesn’t seem to work nicely on mobile browsers.
I _really_ hate to say it because I’m not a huge fan of social media, but the whole point of getting your music out there is to… get your music out there… and the social features of SoundCloud allow you to build a worldwide audience.
SoundCloud has made a few missteps in recent years and the audio quality and upload queue could definitely be improved. I also get message spam through SoundCloud, which is annoying. But it’s gratifying to know that people from all over the world are listening to my tracks and reposting them. It’s gratifying to get comments from someone you’ve never met, click over to their stream, and hear some awesome new music.
So at first glance it seems like Octave gives you less but asks for money up front. Improved sound quality and faster upload processing are not worth $200/year unless you’re already making good money from your music. And for a lot of people out there, making money is never the point of making music, so they’ll never have the money to spend. It would be cool if they could offer a permanently free account with limited upload time so that people could try it out beyond the two-week free trial.
how about instead of charging the artist money, pay him for the content that you are to lazy to provide!
you nailed it!
If you cannot afford 200$ a years, you are fucking poor.
Best you remove the ‘lorem ipsum’ from your screenshots in your next press release as this doesn’t fill me with confidence that your site is ready / live etc.
I love it, actually. I have used Soundcloud since its inception but it did not provide the tools i need for sharing music with my clients. Octave.is does.