SoundCloud player for Google+ gets visual refresh and more discovery features

The SoundCloud player has been given a fresh lick of paint and a new discovery feature for good measure.

The widget which plays music shared from SoundCloud straight from the Google+ stream was announced in late-summer last year, and recently it has been redesigned to be more beautiful, also adding (and taking away) functionality to the player.

In the initial release, the album art would be displayed on the left with the artist, song title and scrubber on the right. Buttons to "Like" and share the music would also be displayed above the scrubber, but this appears to be gone from the Google+ player as far as I'm aware.

Old player

The new player is more aesthetically pleasing with smooth animations, reflections and good use of blur for giving focus when the user interface is called up. The widget is compact just like the old version but with a dark grey background when not in use, but as soon as you hit the trademark orange play button, the full player expands and you're greeted with the new look. The cover art forms the background, and the scrubber's reflection lines the bottom of the widget.

Discover New Sounds

The folks over at +SoundCloud have added a new feature which will keep the music going even when the originally shared song has finished. This is thanks to suggestions, or tracks that are similar to the one shared that are displayed when the music is paused or the track has finished playing.

The pause screen on the new player

All-in-all some very good improvements, but the removal of the sharing buttons may be rather disappointing for the die-hard SoundCloud user.

Want to check out the new player for yourself? Well it's a good job I've included an embedded post of the player below for you (please note that clicking on the play button will take you to Google+ before playing, which is a limitation of the embed feature):

How do you like the new improvements? Will the changes make you want to share more music from SoundCloud?