Dear Freesounders,

We collected some statistics from last year’s usage of Freesound that we would like to share with you.?We’re sure you’ll find this insanely interesting :)?Let’s start with the most obvious one: the number of?new sounds uploaded during 2016…

35,625 new sounds!

which corresponds to…

588?hours of audio!

Impressive isn’t it??This was achieved at a rate of approximately 100 sounds uploaded every day.?As shown in the plot below, most of the sounds uploaded during 2016 were?released under the?Creative Commons 0?and?Creative Commons Attribution, licenses:

All in all, the number of sounds hosted in Freesound is growing at a rate higher than linear, which means that it will take less time to grow from 300k to 400k than it took from 200k to 300k sounds. This is shown in the figure below, which plots the evolution of the total number of sounds since the starting days of Freesound:

In total Freesound?now hosts more than 327k sounds, corresponding to more than 4400 hours of audio content.?Can you guess when we’ll reach 400k? :)?But what about the?kinds of sounds which are being uploaded? Well, this is somewhat difficult to answer, but to have an idea you can look at the tagcloud below, built using only sounds from 2016:

• NOTE: To avoid bias in the tagcloud, we have removed tags from a significant number of sounds that were?uploaded by us (the Music Technology Group) as part of our?Good-sounds project (a?~5000k single note sound collection).

The most used tag is field-recording, which means that the most common type of uploaded sounds are?probably field-recordings, did you expect that? We can see anyway that other tags like loop, voice and effect?are also pretty much used, which shows how heterogeneous is the content uploaded to Freesound. Did you ever tried playing with the random sound browsing mode? Give it a try, it’s a good fun 😉

This is the ranking?of top sound uploaders for?2016:

• NOTE: Similarly as above, we removed our Music Technology Group user from this list which would obviously take the first position with?the?~5000k single-note sound collection.

Thank you to all of the above uploaders, and also to everyone else who uploaded a sound in 2016 who doesn’t appear on the list.

And now what about some numbers about the consumption of Freesound?content??Let’s ?continue with another obvious statistic:?the number of sound downloads (including packs) during 2016…

16,000,000 downloads!

Yes, 16 million downloads in a single year!?At a rate of 50k downloads per day, Freesound has accumulated a total?of?94M downloads?since launch(!).?In fact, as the figure below shows, the number of sound downloads is growing every year:

These downloads happen after?users find relevant sounds when they’re searching. So the next obvious question is: what are people searching for? Again this might be hard to answer, but below you can see a “termcloud” of the most common search terms?of 2016:

So yeah, wind, explosion, etc… By the way, this happens at a rate of 150k?queries every day! If you want to maximise the number of downloads of your sounds, you now know what you have to do 😉

You’ll also like?to know that during this?year 2016 you’ve exchanged more than 25k ?messages, added 120k sound ratings, written 2500 forum posts and more than 44k sound comments!?All in all this shows how?active and vibrant the Freesound community is. We would sincerely want to thank everyone that participates in?the community by rating and commenting sounds, writing in the forums and also searching and downloading content.?Let us also take this opportunity to?very specially thank all ?Freesound uploaders, more than?16k users have contributed at least one sound, and?the Freesound moderators team, who?do an incredible job?on their free time?to make Freesound possible and have indeed listened to all of it 🙂

So that’s it, keep on Freesounding and make these stats even more awesome next year!

frederic (on behalf of the Freesound team)

Dear Freesounders,

We’re happy to announce that he have just finished uploading the Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra 2 Community Edition?(VSCO 2 CE) sound library. That is ~3000 instrument samples?including a wide variety of orchestral instruments and organised in ~70 packs, all released with CC0 license!

Quoting authors description, “VSCO 2 CE is an open-source, open-ended subset of the main VSCO 2 branch designed for young composers, hobbyist sample library designers, and students around the world to create better sounding music for free, and learn more about the process of sample library development“.

All sounds are tagged with instrument names, instrument family, note names, midi note numbers?and, when available, different velocity layers and articulations. Check them out at?http://www.freesound.org/people/Samulis/.

Thanks to Sam Gossner?for having created such an amazing open sound library and offered it for uploading in Freesound!

Enjoy!!!

frederic

Dear all,

We just deployed a couple of new useful features that we want you to know about:

• Short share sound urls: if you go to a sound page (e.g.?this one by kirbydx) and look at the share section in the sidebar you’ll see a new ‘share url’ property with a link that points to that?page with the form http://freesound.org/s/<sound_id>. The link does not include the username so it is shorter?than the usual url (http://freesound.org/people/<username>/sounds/<sound_id>)?and might be useful?for sharing when url length is a concern 😉
• Inappropriate content warning: as?some of you will know sounds can be flagged (via sound page)?and we admins get notified with the reasons you give?(e.g. sound is illegal or offensive). Based on these flags, Freesound will now display a warning for the sounds which are considered inappropriate. The warning can be dismissed with a single click and there is an option in your settings page to completely?disable them.

We hope you find these new features useful!

frederic

Dear Freesounders,

Tomorrow?September 13 at 10 a.m. CEST Freesound will be down for approximately two and a half hours while we perform some maintenance on our servers. ?We?re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

keep on Freesounding 🙂

edit: all servers have been updated and we’re back to normality (September 13th 12 a.m.)

Dear Freesounders,

As part of the Audio Commons Initiative (that we introduced in a previous post), we?re rolling out a survey to gain insights into how creative users interact or wish to be able to interact with Creative Commons (CC) audio content. We?d like to get feedback from sound designers, musicians, sound engineers, game audio developers and, in general, from anyone working with CC audio content.

You can participate by accessing this URL: https://goo.gl/U8mAz9
You can also comment about it in this forum thread

The objective of the Audio Commons initiative is to promote and facilitate the reuse of CC audio content in production environments. This includes the development of new technologies for annotating and organising sound samples and music pieces, the development of technologies to support easy licensing procedures of CC audio content, and the development of tools to allow easy access to CC audio content within existing production environments such as a DAWs or video editors. Freesound is playing a big role in this initiative as, together with Jamendo, we will be the first repository of CC audio content to be part of the initiative. Therefore, the success of the Audio Commons Initiative is the success of Freesound 😉

Please participate, your opinion is very important to us 🙂

Thanks!!!

frederic

Dear Freesounders,

We just wanted to let you know that we just deployed two small yut important upgrades that we’re sure you’ll appreciate.

On the one hand we improved Freesound’s html uploader. Now you can upload multiple files at once without the need of having Flash installed 🙂

On the other hand we upgraded the captcha (aka anti robot spam) system to latest Google’s reCaptcha. Now it should be faster for you to prove you’re not robots, and harder for robots to pretend they’re humans…

We hope you enjoy these improvements!

Cheers,

frederic

Dear Freesounders,

Today May 10 at 2 a.m. CEST Freesound will be down for approximately one hour while we perform some maintenance on our servers. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

To commemorate the 10 years of Freesound we are organising an event in the framework of the MUTEK festival in Barcelona.

The Music Technology Group will have an Artist-in-residence that will create a musical work using Freesound. The result will be presented as part of an event dedicated to Freesound that will take place on March 3rd. The artist has been selected by Mutek festival through an open call.

The program of the event is:

– Introduction to Freesound and its use in the musical creation
– Audition of the work “Paseo BCN” by Andr?s Lewin-Richter
– Presentation and live session of the artist in residence MUTEK [ES] – Freesound. Work created in real time using some applications created around Freesound.
– Chromahelix ? Live Act (https://soundcloud.com/chromahelix). Electroacoustic ensamble established in Barcelona, that expose the audience to different sound textures, combining soundscapes and minimal rythms. In this performance the audience will be able to interact with Freesound in real time.

All the performances will use a surround octophonic system.

You are all invited to come to celebrate the 10 years of Freesound.

March 3rd, 2016 ? 7PM
Sala Polivalent
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
C/ Roc Boronat 138
Barcelona, SPAIN

Free admission

Organised by:

Music Technology Group, Phonos Foundation, MUTEK[ES]

Dear Freesounders,

It’s been a while since our last post, but as always we’ve been busy working on many Freesoundish things. This time, we’d like to let you know about the new?Audio Commons initiative!

During the last year we’ve been working together with two other research institutions (Queen Mary University of London and University of Surrey) and three?companies (Jamendo, Audiogaming and Waves), to prepare a project proposal for one of the funding lines of?the European Commission (Horizon 2020 programme). The project we proposed is to support that?Audio Commons initiative, and the good news is that we have been granted the funding! This means that we will start now working in this project together with the aforementioned research institutions and companies and with the aim of attracting more people in our way.

But, “what is Audio Commons all about and why are you explaining all of this to us”? Well, the objective of the Audio Commons initiative is to promote and facilitate the reuse of Creative Commons audio content in production environments. This includes the development of new technologies for annotating and organising sound samples and music pieces, the development of technologies to?support easy?licensing procedures?of CC audio content, and the development of tools to allow easy access to CC audio content within existing production environments?such as a DAWs or video editors.?Freesound is playing a big role in this initiative?as, together with?Jamendo, we will be the first repository of CC audio content to be part of the initiative. You’ll find more detailed information in the Audio Commons web site: www.audiocommons.org.

We’re very excited to?start this new initiative and to work on all the challenges that it poses. We sincerely think that the Audio Commons initiative and Freesound can be greatly?beneficial to each other, and expect that the?outcomes of this symbiosis will also be very valuable?and useful to the whole Freesound community. That’s all for now, we’ll keep you informed!

cheers,

frederic

Dear freesounders,

we are happy to announce that we’ve just launched?a new Freesound-side site called Freesound Labs.?Freesound Labs is a directory of projects, hacks, apps, research and other initiatives that use content from Freesound or use the Freesound API. Our aim is to keep on updating this directory as we come across more and more Freesound powered projects. If you know of projects that should be listed in this?directory and are not there, please let us know 😉

We hope that you enjoy navigating Freesound Labs?and getting to know what amazing things people are doing with?content from Freesound. In?the end, all this is possible thanks?to all of your contributed sounds, so you can feel proud of it 🙂

cheers,

frederic