Also, a great bit of UX detail worth noting is that it prepends '▶' to the page title when audio is playing, so you can see which browser tab sound is coming from - something all multimedia pages should adopt!
totally agree. and, in general, love little details like this. it’s probably something that the vast majority of users wouldn’t notice (or really care about, if they did), and it certainly isn’t a make-or-break feature/differentiator for them, but it shows they know their product and are focused on improving it, rather than adding features or integrating with other shit just for the sake of doing so. nice work
It's very annoying when an advert or a forgotten youtube embed suddenly starts making noises on a tab I'm not looking at and I end up hunting through several tabs and closing innocent unread tabs trying to stop the noise.
(I noticed the ▶ in the title bar a while ago and like it a lot. Mixcloud.com also does a nice thing where the favicon shows you how far through a mix you are and whether it's playing or paused.)
It should however be possible for webpages that use browser APIs to play audio (e.g. via HTML5).
(I'd still probably prefer to view a user's mixes page by page, but I understand that I come from the pre-infinite-scroll generation and a good chunk of Soundcloud's target audience does not.)