The Freesound Blog

Hello there Freesounders!

we would like to announce that we have introduced a couple of small new features, some of them were requested in the forums.

First of all, we have increased the number of sounds that can be described per round from 4 to 10. This will be specially useful for users that tend to upload a lot of sounds at once, and will help you have your sounds described quicker.
Also to easy up the description process, you will now be able to see the description of more than one sound at a time.

We also added query term highlighting in the sound descriptions of the search results page.

Furthermore we have added some minor layout improvements, fine-tuned anti-spam measures and updated the moderation interface in order to promote oldest sounds at the beginning of the queue. This way sound moderation will become closer to “first in first out”.  And now that I’m talking about sound moderation, don’t forget that moderators are humans and do this task voluntarily in their free time. They take this responsibility very seriously and always do the moderation as fast as they can! They deserve a biiiiig hurrayyyy from the whole Freesound community!

Said that, keep on Freesounding!

Today is the 8th anniversary of Freesound! Congratulations to the researchers, developers, moderators, donors and users who have been and are part of this project for the success achieved so far. Thanks to the collaboration of this great community we have now more than 160.000 free sounds from all over the world.

Freesound was started in 2005 in the Music Technology Group (MTG). One of the first aims behind it was to create an open repository of sounds to be used for scientific and artistic research, but quickly became a very popular site used by a wide variety of people to share sounds and the experiences around them.

Freesound has now 3.5 million registered users around the world, about 40.000 visits a day, and the total number of visits in those eight years has been more than 57 million, coming from almost all the countries of the world.

There are many successful usages of the sounds in Freesound, for example in the movie Children of Men and in a song of the internationally known band The Prodigy. Freesound has received several awards, such as a BMW award, a Barcelona City award and a Google research award twice. But what is most important, during all those years users have shared really amazing sounds. Find the opinion of the community about the coolest sounds on Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/

The interest for sharing sounds keeps growing and the community of active users of Freesound is also growing. For the MTG, Freesound offers an exceptional framework with which to carry research in the context of semantic web technologies. But we are specially proud of being able to offer a very useful service to the society.

On April 5th will be the 8th anniversary of Freesound, and thanks to your contributions more than 160,000 sounds have been shared with the community so far!

Now, the Freesound team would like to look back in the Freesound history and find some of the most original or unusual sounds that have been uploaded during all these years. That’s why we need your help:

In your opinion, which are the most amazing / surprising / coolest sounds you have ever found on Freesound?

Please leave your comments here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/

Thank you for all these years of cool sounds!!!

Hello dear Freesounders!

After almost eight years of great sounds and constant growth it has become necessary to define some terms of use for Freesound. These terms are intented to outline the legal aspects of Freesound and to clarify your rights as users, our privacy policy and, in general, to protect you and us against incorrect uses of the site.

By adding these terms of use we have not changed the philosophy of the site. It is just a necessary step to keep on growing and improving Freesound!

In order to continue using Freesound you’ll have to accept these terms of use. But hey, don’t worry because they are not excessively long to read and we have also created a friendly version of the terms which makes them much easier to understand. Here is a brief summary of the terms:

• Uploaded sounds are released under one of the CC licenses you choose. Other content (metadata, tags, comments, etc…) is provided as CC-Zero.
• Your activity in Freesound is public and can be seen by all users (except your private messages).
• You are responsible for your posted content.
• We (Freesound) keep your data confidential and apply security measures to keep this confidentiality.
• We (Freesound) don’t warrant that all the data on the site is correct. We are not liable for information not posted by us on this site.
• We (Freesound) may remove accounts of users that do not comply with the terms or who do not behave correctly (spam, offensive comments…).
• We can use anonymized data collected from Freesound (statistics about sounds, tags, comments, downloads…) for research purposes.
• You agree to receive email notifications from us.

You can read the full text and the friendly version here.

Starting tomorrow (1/3/13), the first time you log in to Freesound you’ll see a screen saying that you have to accept the terms of use before continue using Freesound. That screen will contain the same explanation you’re reading here.

Thank you for your patience and understanding! We really appreciate the commitment of the Freesound community!!!

Hi all,

It looks like the private message spammers have really started liking us lately. Almost daily I’m deleting spammers. For now the best is to “report as spam” as soon as you get a spam message: if more than a few people do this the person will be blocked from sending further messages immediately.

Other than this we are also looking into severely restricting the message-sending capabilities of people who have not done certain actions yet on the site. I won’t say which because this might be a hint for the spammers, but the idea is that if you haven’t done X or Y on the site you won’t be able to send more than X messages per minute/hour/day.

Sorry for the annoyance!

- Bram

A number of people have been encountering problems recently while downloading sounds on freesound. We apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. We have tracked the issue down to a misconfigured router in the freesound network. This fault has been resolved and downloads should return to normal. Once again, sorry to those who this error has affected.

Hello all,

It’s not always easy to describe your sound files, we know. Hoever, we did want to let you know that even we at freesound are impressed at this example of a perfect description. The uploader describes the recording gear, the environment, why he uploaded the file, etc etc. Thanks a lot Philip Goddard!

If everyone would use 1/10th the description power Mr. Goddard seems to wield freesound would be an even better place.

- Bram

Hello everyone,

today we have updated Freesound search functionalities with some improvements we have been working on in the last weeks. First of all, we have added a new sorting algorithm that automatically sorts the search results according to their relevance with respect to the introduced query terms. This is now the sorting option by default, but you can still sort sounds according to their number of downloads, average rating, creation date or duration.

Moreover, we also added a search option called Group sounds by pack which basically collapses all search results belonging to sounds of the same pack in a single entry that can then be expanded with a provided link. With that option we prevent filling pages of search results with very similar sounds. Group sounds by pack is enabled by default, but you can switch it off using the advanced search options.

We have also slightly changed the behavior of Most downloaded sounds list in the sounds page. As some of you requested in the forums, we are now displaying a list of the most downloaded sounds only among those uploaded during the last week. In this way we promote more popular new sounds instead of all-time popular sounds.

We hope you enjoy these improvements!
Take them as a Christmas present from the Freesound Team

Happy freesounding!