Hi again…
…and welcome back to our community update post! This month we don’t have any major user-ready features to show, but there are a number of things we’ve been doing in the background which will allow nice new stuff in the future. Here is a list of things:
- New analysis of sounds with Audio Commons audio analysis tools. For the last 3 years we’ve been coordinating a project called Audio Commons (see original post in this blog here), focused on developing audio analysis tools and promoting CC audio. We have now analysed Freesound with some tools developed in the project. The analysis results are already available and usable through the Freesound API, but still are experimental and work in progress. This analysis will allow us in a near future to deploy new features, specially in the search page. For example, would you like to be able to filter search results by things like “only sounds including 1 sound event”, or “sounds isolated from background noise” or “only bright sounds”? Well, we have many ideas in mind but these are some of the features we’re planning to research and deploy to Freesound in the near future.
- Improve tracking of email addresses that bounce. This is important because it will allow us to stop sending emails to addresses that no longer exist and reduce problems with blocked emails.
- Other minor bug fixes, security upgrades and optimizations.
Also we’d like to take this opportunity to give a quick update about the new interface design that we announced almost 1 year ago. We never gave an estimated release date because we knew these things sometimes tend to require more time than planned, and we did good 🙂 It has happened that even though the design phase has been finished for a number of months now (and we’re really happy with it!), the implementation has been very slow and we’re are not yet ready to give any estimate other than “at some point during 2019”. But yeah, it is coming! Aaaaand as a prize for your patient waiting here you have a little teaser so you can have an idea of the main design lines:
That?s it for now, enjoy Freesound!
The Freesound Team
The new design looks slick. Can’t wait for it to roll out 🙂
Hi.
I am totally blind and I am using the website with a screen reader.
Before the new interface is out, I hope there is a way to test it before hand to make sure that is as accessible as the current interface or even better.
Or I hope that we will have the option to switch between the 2 if needed until the new one has no issues.
The current interface is pretty much accessible. Uploading, searching commenting etc is fine.
The only thing that we don’t know at the moment is the kind of stars a sound has got including our own.
We can choose how many stars we are going to a give to a sound but it’s not possible to know what kind of stars other people gave to it.
Thanks a lot and keep up the good work.
Hi Nikos,
Thanks for your message. Our plan is that there will be an A/B testing phase in which both interfaces are available, but this might not end up being 100% true due to potential technical limitations. However we are committed to making the website accessible through screen readers and will will surely need your help to make sure its all working as expected once the time comes.
Looks sick! Thank you guys!