Introducing Freesound “Collections”

Hi everyone,

We are very happy to announce the introduction of a new feature called “Collections”. This is a new way to group sounds that complements “Packs”, and that fully replaces the “Bookmarks” functionality. With “Collections”, one can create groupings of Freesound sounds, uploaded by different users (like in the old Bookmark categories). Collections can be public or private, can be downloaded as a single compressed file and, most important of all, can be collaborative! When creating a collection, one can specify a list of Freesound users that will act as maintainers and can also add and remove sounds to it. While browsing Freesound, sounds can be added to a collection by clicking on the small collection icon on the top-right corner of the waveform display (it is the same icon previously used for bookmarks).

Public collections can be browsed in the Collections Page, and also the main search page will include Collection as a facet so that you can filter sounds by collection, and also match sounds by the names of the public collections they’re in.

To bootstrap the new feature, we created public collections for the 10 playlists of the “Sounds to be Protected: 20 years of Freesound” installation that was showcased last year in the context of the Freesound 20th anniversary celebration. Each collection is based on an installation playlist assembled by a different artist or collective, revisiting sounds contributed to Freesound over the past twenty years. Together they form a living archive of shared listening, collaboration, and sonic memory. You can check them out here.

With the release of Collections, you’ll notice that the Bookmarks feature has disappeared. All existing user bookmarks have been migrated to new private collections. Bookmark categories are naturally mapped to user collections of the same name, and the uncategorized bookmarks have been migrated to a collection named “My bookmarks”.

We have spent great efforts developing this feature, and we have many ideas to continue improving it in the future. Big shout out to Quim Marcé and Domonkos Kostyál who worked hard on it during their internships at the Music Technology Group. If you find bugs, please report them and be pateient with us 🙂 And if you have ideas for improvement, please share them with us!

frederic
on behalf of the Freesound team