OK, I don't know how "new" this feature is, but I just noticed it.
It always used to be annoying trying to squeeze an MP3 into the 10MB size limit on a free account. I'd usually have to experiment with encoding qualities to find the best bitrate that still came in under 10 MB, and long songs often had to be encoded at a noticeably poorer bitrate.
Plus they didn't used to support lossless formats. Because I only save FLACs to my portable player, that meant taking the extra step of creating an MP3 for SoundClick. Now you can upload FLAC, WAV, AIFF, AIF, AU and SND files to SoundClick. I can just shoot the FLAC up there and skip the MP3 step altogether. Even though the upload takes longer, that's mostly mitigated by skipping the "wait...encoding" stage.
Now, the size limit for MP3s on SoundClick has been upped to 25 MB, and to 100 MB for FLAC files. Yay!
Playback is still limited to 160 KB/s. However, the higher the quality you upload the less degradation there will be when they re-encode it to 160 KB/s for playback. Downloads are still limited to 160 KB/s on free accounts. Paid accounts allow downloads at full quality.
I just uploaded my
first FLAC version and played it, back-to-back with the MP3 for comparison. As expected, the difference in quality is very subtle, but audible in the high frequencies and transients.