Hello all, a quick blog post to tell you all we are currently experiencing some problems with freesound. We’re very busy trying to figure out what exactly is going wrong and it looks like our database server is badly configured…
Hold on while we tweak the settings! You might experience some glitches or more downtime today…
Due to some needed operations on the server, we will be closed for maintenance, starting today at 12h GMT+2. Hopefully the down time will last only a few hours.
You have been warned!
Service?announcement! 🙂 We’ve been experiencing some problems with the email queue on freesound because we’re sending too many emails. Practically this means that your activation / password reset / … emails might arrive a bit later. Give it some extra hours. Some of you might even encounter a whole day of delay!
Dear Freesounders,
For more than a year now we’ve been promising you an upgrade of
freesound. Dates got shifted into the future, things took (much)
longer than expected, … About half a year ago everything shifted
into higher gear when the team of Vincent, Gerard, Frederic,
Stelios and Jordi started getting involved deeply in freesound code.
Stuff starting whizzing along, more work was done than ever on
freesound “2” or “nightingale”, or now just… freesound.org again. So
many things were rebuilt, reenvisioned and reimplemented that it would
be rather useless to try to list them all. But let it be clear that we
started from zero: the old -and relatively broken- codebase was
replaced by a bright shiny new one, based on the great django
framework.
We know the new site creates emotional responses as you have been
working so closely with the old one. For us it’s such a big change
which will let freesound “breathe” again.
Hopefully this new freesound site will serve us for many years to
come. For us (the people behind the scenes) the biggest advantage to
this new site is probably the maintainability: it will be so much
easier to adapt the code, add new features, fix bugs…
Talking about bugs: feel free to post bugs in this forum or via the
contact form.
Thanks for waiting and special thanks to the beta testers!
Greetings,
– The Proud Freesound team (Bram, Gerard, Vincent, Jordi, Frederic,
Stelios and Xavier)
Hello everyone,
for freesound2 we are looking for more designers/css/html people. If you feel like helping out (for free!), please let me know as soon as possible…
– bram
Congratulations freesound!! We have just reached 100,000 sounds!!!!! 🙂
Hello everyone,
A small note that the first (alpha!) version of the freesound 2 API has been released. If you are a developer and would like to use freesound for fun sound experiments, give it a spin:
http://tabasco.upf.edu/docs/api/
Note that until freesound 2 is released it is Subject To Change!
For requests, comments or bugs use our mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/freesound-api
– Bram
When you read a post about paypal freezing 600,000??for the MineCraft developer?on his blog?you think, “oooh bad luck”! And then it happens to freesound too. We have about 4000??in our paypal account and now paypal doesn’t believe we are a non-profit organisation. This means that people can keep adding money to the account, but we can’t withdraw. The first fax (fax!! how retro…) we sent to them got processed, but when we got even more questions and answered by fax again no reply came. We tried again, no luck. This is rather annoying… We will try again via the “resolution center” at paypal (which is slow and buggy) but…Update: everything was resolved and we got our money – it took a long time, but …!
David Smithson from Hive writes to tell me about the usage of freesound sounds in Umbrella Adventure
Umbrella Adventure is an entirely hand-drawn exploration adventure game, which takes place in a huge forest full of platforming challenges, enemies and puzzles. The main character, Gopher, wakes up to find his collection of cakes stolen in the night, and it’s up to you to arm yourself with an umbrella and head out into the world to bring them all back, by using the umbrella to overcome the obstacles in your way, meeting new friends, and opening new doorways and paths through the forest.
One of the game’s biggest focal points is immersion – creating the feeling that the world you’re exploring is solid, consistent and real, and this, from our side, involves making sure the entire world feels right, moves right, and sounds right. For a game like this to work, we needed a huge range of different sounds which could be combined to create a rich, realistic soundscape for players to explore through. In the three or four years since the development of the game began, we’ve used a ton of material from Freesound contributors, mostly ambient, nature and weather effects, although there are some bizarre sounds in there too; it’s pretty neat to think that, for example, the sound of someone scratching their beard has contributed to our work like that. A lot of care was taken to make sure everything in the game, from the player character to moving enemies and scenery, sounds the way it should, so players can really get inside the game and believe what they’re hearing, and in this respect Freesound has been absolutely essential to us. Visiting and being part of Freesound is something really integral to the ‘indie spirit’ of game development for us; the community there is really dedicated to promoting the creative output of all its members, and it’s great to see so many people united by their common love of finding and making great sounds. It’s something we’re all really thankful is still there, and very proud to be working with.
The guys at Casa da M?sica in Portugal are running a competition which involves Freesound.org and yours truly as a judge. Have a look! Enter! Win a midi controller!!
The first Digit?pia Miniatures Competition took place in 2008. The aim of this competition was to create a musical miniature of up to 90 seconds, using the resources available at Digit?pia. Entrants had to use at least one sound from those recorded on the Porto Underground by Factor E, Casa da M?sica?s resident team in the Education Department, on World Music Day in 2008. Aimed at stimulating the continual use of Digit?pia?s resources and encouraging greater musical ambition, this competition attracted many and varied entries, and the winner Jo?o Gravato, received a Midi controller and 20 tickets for events of his choice held at Casa da M?sica during 2009.
The next three competitions ? all of them international, which is also reflected in the panels comprising major figures from the field ? are physically separate from Digit?pia, although the facility possesses all the resources need to produce an entry. Nevertheless, they possibly come even closer to the philosophy of the project. The differences can immediately be seen in the prizes on offer: instead of a commercially-available Midi controller, we are developing a special one-off Midi controller, with the unmistakable Digit?pia stamp. But more importantly, all the competitions reflect the idea of sharing with the community: from original Max/MSP or Pure Data patches distributed with open source licences, to new contributions of small musical gestures to freesound.org. It all culminates in a special competition which is full of potential: we will reward the most daring dream by making it come true!”
