We are big fans of SoundCloud, a really useful service that is part Flickr for music, part professional music collaboration hub. Artists such as Beck, Moby and Sonic Youth now use the service to distribute tracks through their blogs and connect with their fans.

We’ve received many requests from WordPress.com bloggers that they would like us to work with SoundCloud to enable this service, and today we have some good news for you! You can now easily embed the SoundCloud player on your WordPress.com blog.

To embed SoundCloud groups or member track playlists or a single track in your blog, explore the SoundCloud website or use the search feature to find a sound that you like.

Once you’ve located a song that you want to embed, copy the URL of that song from your browser’s address bar to your clipboard or click on the “Share” icon and locate the “WordPress” button:

Your shortcode should now look similar to this this:

[soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/meat-katie/meat-katie-vs-friends-of-mine-are-you-looking"]

You can then paste this code into your post, and it will display the player::

You can also customize the player size, embed sets and groups, and decide if you want comments within the player turned on or off. For details check out the documentation in our support area.

For those of you on a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SoundCloud Shortcode plugin.