freesound.iua.upf.edu becomes www.freesound.org

After 3 years of using the rather long and confusing “freesound.iua.upf.edu” URL, we have finally convinced ourselves and the university that we needed a new domain. Starting effectively now, The Freesound Project get’s a new url:

http://www.freesound.org

(We will also stop refering to Freesound as “The Freesoud Project” but will rather switch to saying “Freesound dot org”.)

A few words about this domain name. After a long debate we decided we would buy the domain from buydomains.com. Buydomains.com (deliberately not turned into a link!) is one of those companies that makes money from buying domains on the web, holding them ransom and then selling them for a very high price. Depending on your view this might be called cybersquatting (although I don’t like the name as I have respect for squatters) or just plain extorsion: freesound.org was bought for the sum of 4073?.

Once Nightingale is up, we will have one of those nice “donate until we get to this sum” meters so the community can pay up to half of that. That way we can say that the Freesound.org domain is owned by the community. If we had done it the other way around (ask the community for half, then buy the domain), someone would have outsmarted us by buying the domain and increasing the price even more.

It was about time to make our support for Freesound even more official and give it an even stronger personality. We have also started a new initiative which will be hosted under the name http://barcelona.freesound.org/ and we are hoping that we will be able to start (or perhaps others will start!) other local initiatives related to sounds and sound recording. More news about barcelona.freesound.org soon!

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8 Responses to freesound.iua.upf.edu becomes www.freesound.org

  1. Hello! I am a contributor to Freesound and the managing producer of Chicago Public Radio’s Soundmarks project. Check out our interactive map!

  2. 110110010 says:

    This was a really nice step. I always had to type “freesound” to google, because i couldn’t remember the address. 🙂

  3. Noise Cuisine says:

    unfortunately the website is in spanish only – can someone explain to me, what’s the difference between the “oldschool” geotagged sounds on freesound and the barcelona.freesound site?

  4. Ari Alsina says:

    Sons de Barcelona is like the local Freesound for this city, that’s why for the moment it is just in Catalan, also we take into account that one of the main uses we’ll give to it at the beginning will be being a tool to use in workshops at schools to motivate young students to join the comunity. Anyway, everybody will be able to write and express himself in their own language, and we’ll try to add soon some automatic translators in order to help users who don’t understand Catalan.

    About geotagging, both Freesound.org and barcelona.freesound.org uses GoogleMaps API for this purpose.

  5. Noise Cuisine says:

    Ari, thanks fo the explanation.

    I wonder if it makes more sense o await nightingale and improved geotagging, or if starting up a local “city.freesound.org” would be more interesting.

    As I understand it, the advantage of classical geotagging is, that you can quicker go around the whole globe, which I find is a very nice way of “grasping” the world instead of being into some local borders.

    On the other hand I presume that with a local site it might be more attractive to get locals interested into forking through their city for sounds.

  6. Ari Alsina says:

    In fact, when we will have finished the development of the comunication between Sons de Barcelona and Freesound, the map of the local site will still be located in Barcelona as it is now, but also will be able to contain all the other sounds of the world from freesound.

    But users of Sons de Barcelona will only be able to upload sounds in a delimited area, otherwise we will suggest them to become a direct Freesound user.

    And we think that those borders give the sense to this local project, where users will be able to write deeply about the sounds that they upload or about their individual projects about concrete subjects in personal blogs included in the site.

    We will be able to offer the technology at the end of this year so that other cities can create a city.freesound.org and later on we will give the tools to make the conversion to version 2.0 when freesound 2.0 will be ready

  7. Pingback: Freesound.org Update: Name Change, Radio, CC Licensed PHD, and more - Creative Commons

  8. boxbcn says:

    Hello, I enjoy reading all of your post. I like to write a little comment to support you.

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