DEPARTMENT-LICENSED · MUSIC, PODCASTING AND ANY COURSE THAT RECORDS

Soundtrap — always launch from Canvas, and everything else

One rule prevents the only Soundtrap failure that costs a student their work, and it is a rule about where they click, not what they do. That is section 01, because it is the whole page for most people. The rest is what the tool is for, what it costs, and one thing about it that a lot of people have wrong.

Idea starters, not finished practice. None of this is an expectation. On what belongs in a music or a podcasting curriculum, you are right and I am not — I support the connection to Canvas, and the department owns the teaching.

Start with what you are trying to do

Say the one rule

A student who goes to soundtrap.com instead of Canvas creates a second account and their work is in the other one.

TAKES 30 seconds on day one

GETS YOU the whole class of problem gone

Is it still alive?

Spotify sold it. It did not die. There is a feature that shipped five days ago.

TAKES one minute

GETS YOU no panic, no migration

What it actually does

Multi-track recording in a browser, podcasting with transcription, and video scoring as of this month.

TAKES three minutes

GETS YOU a sense of the range

Canvas and the plan

Canvas needs the School tier and an administrator. Submissions reach SpeedGrader; scores do not sync.

TAKES two minutes

GETS YOU a realistic setup

01 The one rule

Soundtrap’s own support documentation says it plainly: “Always access Soundtrap from within your Canvas account and not from our website.” The documented consequence is a duplicate account.

Here is what that looks like from your side of the desk. A student works for two periods, closes the laptop, comes back Thursday, goes to soundtrap.com because that is what you type when you want Soundtrap, signs in — and the project is not there. Nothing is corrupted and nothing is lost. It is sitting in the account they made through Canvas, and they are now looking at a second, empty one.

The student concludes their work disappeared. You conclude the tool is unreliable. Neither is true, and the fix is thirty seconds on day one: never go to the website, always start from the Canvas assignment. Say it out loud, put it in the assignment description, and say it again in week three.

Soundtrap on joining through Canvas →

The related one: if Soundtrap shows a login prompt when you are inserting it as an external tool while building an assignment, Soundtrap says that is almost always a cookie problem, not an account problem. Third-party cookies blocked in a locked-down browser profile will do it.

02 Yes, it is still alive — and here is why people think otherwise

There is a widespread impression that Spotify killed Soundtrap for Education. It is wrong, and it is wrong for two traceable reasons worth knowing so you can correct it in a hallway.

One: Spotify did leave. In June 2023 Spotify sold Soundtrap back to its original founders. That is a real event and it is where the impression comes from. But a divestment is not a shutdown — the company continued under independent ownership.

Two: one product genuinely was retired — the standalone Soundtrap Capture mobile app. Mobile recording now happens in the main app. If somebody tells you a Soundtrap thing was discontinued, that is the thing.

And the evidence it is healthy: Soundtrap shipped Video Scoring to the education product on August 25, 2026 — five days before this page was written — with ready-to-teach lessons, a rubric and a new sound pack. Students score an MP4, from a built-in library or one they import. Release notes run continuously through the 2025-26 school year. Nothing anywhere announces a sunset.

The Video Scoring announcement → · Release history →

03 What it actually does

Multi-track recording, in a browser

No install. Runs on a Chromebook. Twenty thousand loops and presets, Patterns Beatmaker, Smart Drummer, chords, plus microphone and instrument input. Students collaborate on the same project in real time.

There is now a Mac desktop app that syncs with the web version; Windows is listed as coming.

Podcasting, with a transcript

Record, edit, and get an interactive transcript of the audio that you can edit as text. This is the feature that makes Soundtrap interesting outside the music room — an oral assessment you can read.

Gated to the School plan and above.

Video scoring — new this month

Score a video. Six lessons and a rubric ship with it. A student choosing music for a scene has to defend a reading of that scene, which is a humanities task wearing a music tool.

Announced August 25, 2026.

THE CLASSROOM CONTROLS, WHICH ARE THE REASON TO USE THE EDU VERSION

A teacher dashboard listing every student and group. Assignments you can comment on and check remotely. Groups, with invite codes. And the walled garden: student profiles are not visible outside the school account, and students cannot contact or be contacted by anyone outside their group. Profiles carry a first and last name and nothing else — no picture, no location, no description.

One correction to a common belief: student accounts are not emailless. Soundtrap’s manual account creation asks for an email address. What students avoid is typing credentials, because they arrive by launching from Canvas — which is section 01 again, from the other direction. The walled garden and COPPA →

04 Canvas, the plan tiers, and what does not sync

WHICH PLAN BUYS CANVAS

Three education tiers. Classroom is for a single music teacher and integrates with Google Classroom only — no Canvas. School adds Canvas, podcasting with transcription, unlimited groups and audio download. District adds Clever, ClassLink, single sign-on and the full lesson library.

So Canvas is a budget conversation, not a teacher setting. If you are on Classroom and want Canvas, that is a purchasing question. The plan comparison →

THE SETUP IS AN ADMINISTRATOR JOB

It is an LTI key exchange, configured at the Canvas account, sub-account or course level, and the account-level route needs a Canvas administrator. One warning from their documentation worth passing to whoever does it: regenerating the keys breaks every configured course until the new keys are updated everywhere. Account-level setup →

WHAT REACHES THE GRADEBOOK, AND WHAT DOES NOT

Students submit from inside the studio — File, then Submit Task — and the submission is visible and gradeable in SpeedGrader. That part works and it is better than most tools on this shelf.

What is not documented anywhere is an automatic numeric score syncing back from Soundtrap into the gradebook. You grade it in SpeedGrader. Which is fine — a recording was never going to grade itself — but do not plan around a score appearing on its own. Handing in an assignment to Canvas →

05 Grow down the pathway

Same tool, four altitudes. Soundtrap is used by a small number of courses here, so these four rungs live on one page rather than four — if that changes, they get their own. Nobody is expected to be anywhere on this.

LEVEL I

Foundations — it opens and it saves

Everyone launches from Canvas, everyone is in the right group, and a project survives from Monday to Thursday. Given section 01, this rung is most of the battle and it is worth naming as an achievement rather than a precondition.

LEVEL II

Enhance — the recording replaces the paper

A task that used to be written is spoken instead: a two-minute explanation, a read-aloud, a language sample. Same content, and you hear things a page never showed you — hesitation, emphasis, the sentence they could not finish.

LEVEL III

Deepen — the transcript makes it gradeable

On the School plan, the interactive transcript turns audio into text you can read and annotate. That solves the real objection to oral work: 26 recordings at two minutes each is 52 minutes, and 26 transcripts is fifteen. The evidence becomes affordable, so you can ask for it more than once.

LEVEL IV

Innovate — the argument is in the sound

A student scores a scene, or builds a podcast episode where the edit is the thesis — what they cut, what they let run, what they put underneath a claim. The reasoning lives in choices that cannot be typed, and it is not a slower version of an essay; it is a different kind of evidence.

The Deepen rung is the one worth arguing for outside the music department. Oral evidence has always been the most honest thing we can collect and the least affordable. A searchable transcript changes the cost, and cost was the entire reason we stopped asking. Every student speaking — oral evidence you can actually grade →

06 Where it breaks, and two things to check

No free tier past 30 days. The trial is 30 days with no card required. The free Soundtrap Basic is the consumer product — no walled garden, no teacher dashboard. It is not a fallback for a class.

The trust document is six years old. Soundtrap states compliance with COPPA, GDPR, FERPA and CIPA, signed the Student Privacy Pledge, and names SOPIPA, California AB 1584 and New York Education Law section 2-d. All good — but the trust center PDF is dated September 2020, which is three years before the change of ownership. Worth asking for a current agreement before anything is renewed.

If somebody says BandLab is the free alternative, that stopped being true in June. BandLab for Education 2.0 launched in June 2026 at two dollars fifty per student per year, with free access for eligible Title I schools in the US. It is inexpensive, not free, and it has no named Canvas integration. Audacity and GarageBand remain genuinely free and genuinely offline — no dashboard, no collaboration, no Canvas.

Where to send a problem. If it breaks going through Canvas, that is the connection and it is mine. If it breaks on soundtrap.com too, that is the tool. That one question sorts almost every ticket. Who to ask →

07 Their resources, and ours

From Soundtrap

75-plus lesson plans across 13 subjects, banded by level →
Teacher resource hub →
Every LMS integration article →
Education FAQ →
The lesson plans are login-gated — you need a seat or a trial to open them. Their free teacher certification course is hosted by an outside partner; check it before you send colleagues.

From here

Every student speaking — oral evidence you can grade →
Canvas Studio — for video rather than audio →
The RJ Toolkit — what we run on →
Tool Reference A–Z →

Nobody has ever lost work in Soundtrap. They have lost track of which of their two accounts it is in — and thirty seconds on day one prevents every instance of it.

Jason Beyer · Educational Technology · Regis Jesuit High School · A.M.D.G.

HelpDesk@regisjesuit.com · 303.269.8080 · LAST VERIFIED — AUGUST 2026