Community update October 2017

Dear Freesounders,

We’ve been working hard on Freesound lately and have some news to share with you. You’ll remember that earlier this year we started a campaign to promote donations in Freesound. We had a public discussion in the forums where many of you participated (thanks!), and we finally started the donations campaign in July 2017 (see this forum post for details on the campaign). We’re now getting 15 times more donations than we used to get before starting the campaign which is a great start! It moves us closer to our sustainability goal and it has already allowed us to start spending more time and resources on improving Freesound for all of our users. Thank you all!

We have recently released some new user-visible features to Fresound:

• Donations via stripe.?Some potential donors didn’t want to use Paypal to send donations to us.? As an alternative, we added support for donations by credit card using?Stripe.
• Support for AAC files (.m4a extension). You can now upload sounds encoded using Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). AAC is a lossy audio compression standard designed to be the successor of MP3. Even though we still prefer sounds to be upload using uncompressed formats or non-proprietary formats like OGG, we’re sure that AAC support will come in handy for many Freesound users. [EDIT 20/10/2017: user guyburns?reported that lossless m4a files are also supported but that there seem to be problems detecting the number of channels].
• Faster random sound navigation. We’ve always had the ability to randomly browse for a random sound in Freesound. Now this is faster, try it today!
• Sound license history. We now keep track if a sound uploader changes the license of their sound. This is important because you may have downloaded a sound under one license, and when you go back to check its status some months later the license may have changed! We will now tell you what the license was when you downloaded the sound so that you can be sure of your rights and obligations.

We’ve also made a number of smaller changes which are not as visible, but help us improve Freesound for us and you:

• We now keep a record of what the sound of the day was each day. Do you want a throwback to what the sound of the day was on a particular day of the year??We’ll be able to tell you!
• If you forget your password and your email address you can now reset it using just your username, much the same way that you can log in with both your username and email.
• If you’re uploading many sounds at once with a geolocation, we now remember the last location that you added so that you can quickly add the next.
• Tickets now show faster for our tireless team of moderators (thanks everyone!)
• We’re making changes to move Freesound to a full HTTPS setup, protecting you when you enter passwords when logging in.
• We’re fixing small programming errors that have accumulated over years of Freesound development. If you’ve ever got a message saying “You found some part of Freesound that’s broken”, then don’t worry, we get a notification of the error and we’re working to make sure that these errors happen less for our users.

That’s all for now! Hopefully this will be the first post of a series of more-or-less-regularly-spaced-in-time posts that we’ll be doing to keep you updated about things happening in the Freesound dev world. Want some more exciting news? Then wait for the next post 🙂

Thanks for reading and keep on Freesounding!

The Freesound Team