Social audio scene heats up as Shoudio updates, readies high quality recording

We’ve written a lot recently about apps that allow you to record and share audio. While some are targeting journalists and bloggers with the ability to report ‘live from the scene’, others are opting to encourage users to simply share the sounds around them.

We covered one such app, Broadcastr, just the other day. Now Dutch startup Shoudio, which we first covered last October, has updated its app with new features that make it worth another look.

Shoudio is designed to let you share geotagged snippets of audio with your friends and the new version of the app builds on the idea with what it calls “Audiogmented Reality”. Slightly wonky term aside, the idea of exploring the sounds of a city from a map is quite appealing. The new version updates with nearby shared sounds as you move around your local area. While many places aren’t particularly populated yet, a group of Dutch journalists has been testing the app at SXSW, so look out for their recordings around Austin.

Other enhancements include support to link your recordings to a Foursquare check-in and attach a picture. The social side has been boosted with the ability to find and follow friends from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Shoudio is meanwhile hoping to help spread the word about its app via embeddable widgets that update with new recordings from a user’s feed in real-time.

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So, now we have SoundCloud, AudioBoo, Cinch, iPadio and Broadcastr all vying for to help users share their sounds with the world. The question is, are there enough potential users out there to support them all? One way Shoudio is aiming to differentiate is via HQ (high quality) audio. This uses file sizes ten times the size of the standard app (these will be around 50MB for 10 minutes) which could be particularly useful for broadcasters looking to use the app. This feature is currently in private beta and will be launching soon.

You can find Shoudio, free, on the App Store here.