The Freesound Blog

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!

The Freesound team proudly announces that we have finished the migration and are finally back!

If you find any bugs or broken things please report them in the forums or using the contact form.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

– the Freesound team

Hello everyone!

the server that is currently hosting Freesound is getting older and has realised that time has arrived to leave this job for younger and faster machines. For that reason tomorrow (thursday 25th of October) we’re migrating Freesound to our brand new servers! With that hardware upgrade we’ll be able to handle more requests and make Freesound faster.

Downtime will start around 11 AM (Spanish time, GMT+1). We are planning to be back before 5 PM. After the migration we will greatly appreciate if you notify us about anything you see that is not working well. Freesound has been constantly growing and has become quite a complex system with many many many little things to take into account!

That is all for the moment!
the Freesound team

Hello everyone,

some months ago we introduced a new anti-spam measure to reduce the amount of spam in the forums. This has been working quite well, but we are aware that there is still spam out there and we have been advised that spam is still being sent through private messages.

For that reason, we introduced a new feature that allows the Freesound community to collaboratively help removing spam. You’ll now be able to report sound comments, forum posts or private messages as being spam. We’ll keep track of these reports, and manually “check” these users whose comments, posts and messages have repeatedly being marked as spam.

That is all for the moment!
Keep on freesounding!

the Freesound team

As you may have read in previous posts, email has been quite a nightmare for us during the last few weeks. The problem was triggered by successive changes in the limits of the service we were using, of which we had no prior notice. In addition, the university campus where Freesound runs is closed at this particular time in the year, which further limited our ability to react.

We have now started using a specialized service for email, which is working very well. This may not be the final solution, but it will certainly allow us to transition smoothly in any case. We can now tell for sure that our problems are gone, and emails are sent normally. Once more some emails have been lost in the process. If you didn’t receive your activation email, click on resend activation code on the registration page.

So that was it. Enjoy the summer, and happy freesounding!

The Freesound Team

In the frame of the Campus Gutenberg event, organized by the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), there is an open call for recording sounds related to science and upload them to Freesound.

How do you think science may sound? chemistry, mathematics, biology?

The challenge is to collect as much sounds as possible in order to be played in public on September 18^th ,2012 during the Campus Gutenberg event.

To participate just have to record a sound that represents any scientific discipline and use the following tags:

Tag 1: Campus-Gutenberg

Tag 2: choose one of the following:

Bioscience
Medical-science
Environmental-science
Physics-chemistry-mathematics
Engineering

Tag 3: a tag that describe your sound

The deadline for uploading sound is August 26^th

Campus Gutenberg is an open and free activity that will take place on the 17 and 18 of September at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Find all the information: http://www.occ.upf.edu/gutenberg/?page_id=315

During the days our server was banned, we accumulated a large pile of unsent email. Yet, in order to avoid being banned again, we have to send these at a very slow rate. Unfortunately during this process some emails have been marked as undeliverable and lost forever. For those who asked: delays in moderation have nothing to do with email. Also we have NOT sent any email with “null” sender address or anything like that.

We hope that the queue will be cleared in a few days. If you registered and you don’t receive the activation email in 3 or 4 days, you can click “Resend activation code” in the registration page (but please, not yet!).

UPDATE:
The queue is now cleared, email should be working fine. Back to normal!

UPDATE 2:
Broken again! Something changed at our provider side, working on it …

As many of you have noticed, email from Freesound is currently not working. This means that it is not possible to register, and that emails related with the forum, comments and private messages are not being sent.

The problem is that the way we like Freesound to work we have to send many emails. Sending large amounts of email is no simple thing, it may overload servers, and it may bear confusions, such as our email being reported as spam and our domain blacklisted. We use an external provider for sending email, and at the moment our server has been banned from sending more messages. We are working with them in order to clarify and resolve the situation. Hopefully we’ll be back in business soon!