Me & David are currently at Music Hack Day in Barcelona. The best tech meetup in the world in one of the best cities in the world. To celebrate this we decided to give both the site and our iPhone app some long overdue updates. Here’s the rundown.

- Background audio support for the iPhone
Finally you can check your email while listening to your favorite city.

- iOS 4 support incl. all new graphics
The app looks amazing on the retina display.

- Popular tracks per city
We removed the “Shuffle” tab and replaced it with a popular list with tracks ordered based on plays. This makes it easy to always get the best music from each city.

- Play counts are in
We are now tracking play counts on the site so you can see which city that gets the most listens.

Go check out the site, and, buy the iPhone app which will be updated as soon as Apple approves it in the store.

Our hacking space…

During our visit to Music 4.5 Colin Grant from BBC’s Digital Planet did a short interview with Henrik. Listen to it here. And make sure not to miss the comments at the end on music discovery, SoundCloud and other tech/music related stuff.

Two weeks back we visited London and music/tech conference Music 4.5. We were there as a part of a group of startups that pitched to a bunch of british teens also known as the Travelling Teen Panel put together by Julia Shalet.

The competition for the teens appreciation was harsh, among the other companies were RJDJ, Zova and TubeRadio.fm. But Shivz, Nuru, Rachel and the other seemed to be interested in our idea and actually spoke of us as one of the more interesting ideas of the day. This made us very happy!

Finally this blog has been redesigned, announced and linked from the main site. This is now the main source for all things CitySounds.fm, welcome.

To kick things off we would like to tell you a little bit about some of the recent changes made to the site. A big update was initiated at Music Hack Day Stockholm two weeks ago. The update included a new board, revamped navigation, facebook sharing (+ fans!), play stats and more.

The new board
You might already have noticed that we’ve thrashed the old board that featured the most active cities. We chose to do this since it was a) very static and hardly ever changed b) very similar to the popular board. We replaced it with a list of the cities that have the newest tracks. We think it shows a much more dynamic view of the world and also allows smaller cities to get attention.

New navigation
Finally the top menu has gotten the love it deserves. Now you have easy access to our two city lists as well as your own city.

Facebook sharing and fans
Our become-a-fan-by-tweeting twitter integration has proven quite successful among music peeps and we are very happy about that. So, now we’ve decided to add support for Facebook as well. Tweet or update your facebook status with a city permalink to become a fan and help that city climb the popular chart.

Play stats
Since two weeks we are collecting stats over plays for cities and tracks. We are currently not exposing it but expect plays to affect popularity rankings in a few weeks.

Hope you’ll like the updates, and as usual, all feedback is more than welcome. E-mail us at contact@citysounds.fm

Ever since Music Hack Day in Berlin we’ve been working hard to finish the first version of the CitySounds.fm iPhone app. We are delighted to inform you that it is now available for sale on the App Store.

CitySounds.fm for the iPhone lets you seamlessly browse and listen to tracks from big metropoles like Paris, Chicago & Tokyo as well as smaller towns. You can choose to list cities based on track activity or popularity to catch the latest tunes and styles.

Read more here or get it on the App Store right away!

A few weeks back The Independent named us one of the best 25 music websites online. We are extremely honored to be on that list.

In our upcoming iPhone application we are using streaming library built by Ullrich & Gernot from SoundCloud. A few days ago they announced that library free and open source. So if you’re building an app in Cocoa and want to stream music, check it out!

Better late than never right? We have some really interesting stuff coming up over the next week so we needed a place to gather all our news and thoughts. So, stay put!