Community update July 2019

Hi everyone!

Summer is here and here we are with some news about latest Freesound developments. This time we have released changes in Freesound which have a very big impact on the performance of the site and also some important improvements of user-facing features. Here is a summary of the changes:

• Improved geotag editing for sounds (and for sound description). Now the map is bigger and in sync with the latitude/longitude/zoom fields.
• Added missing email types in email notifications preferences panel. Now you’ll have better control about the email notifications you want to receive from Freesound.
• Reduce use of ReCaptcha in private messages for users we know are not spammers
• Updated Stripe donations API to comply with new European regulations
• Dramatic speed optimizations in some Freesound pages (including frontpage, and browse sounds page) and other general speed optimizations that affect the whole site.
• Many other minor bug fixes and optimizations.

To give you an idea about the speed improvements that we have released in the last couple of weeks, check out this plot which shows CPU usage of one of our servers:

Yellow color indicates the percentage of the time the server is “doing nothing”. In general, the more yellow the better, as it means that the server has enough time to work on all of the tasks it is assigned. As you can see, in the middle of the month there is a sudden change and all the pink area is drastically reduced to leave more space for yellow. This is due to both hardware and software updates which result in a general improvement of Freesound response time. Freesound’s servers are happy now 🙂

We hope you have a great summer and enjoy the new super fast Freesound!

? The Freesound Team