Social music discovery
CloudDeck is music streamer that taps into Soundcloud's database to serve you songs.
CloudDeck is written on the Adobe Air platform, so this app will work across systems. It is a good media streamer that lets you search SoundCloud's huge database of songs. As is the case with Soundcloud, the quality of songs uploaded by artists vary. If you're looking to stream songs by a particular mainstream artist, this app isn't for you. If instead you want to discover undiscovered artists and DJs remixing songs, then CloudDeck is great!While the main function of CloudDeck is to serve you music, it adds social media integration with Facebook and Twitter. If you found an interesting song that you want to share, you can click the Facebook or Twitter icon at the top of the application to share it with your friends or followers. You can also find and follow artists within CloudDeck. Following an artist will automatically deliver their new tracks to your feed.
Users can also use CloudDeck's search feature to find new music. There's options to search by artist, user, or group. Searching by group is interesting as it allows you to find groups of people who have similar tastes in music as you.
In use, we found CloudDeck to be a bit unstable and searching was more of a miss than a hit. A few of our searches returned no results and for some searches that did yield results, the results weren't very relevant. Also disappointing is the inability to upload your own tracks directly from the application, although you can download tracks from other artists if they allow it, but it will open up a browser to get the link.
Overall, CloudDeck has some great ideas to make Soundcloud more social, but its developers need to work on stability and usability.
