Freesound promotional video!

Hey there freesounders!

You all know what Freesound is all about and why you like using it. However, if you want to know a bit more just watch this promotional video we’ve just released:

Share this video and help us promote Freesound and site make this amazing community bigger and bigger!

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Freesound outage July 10, 11 p.m. CEST

Dear Freesounders,
On Wednesday July 10 at 11 p.m. CEST (5 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern) Freesound will be down for a few hours while we perform some additional maintenance on our Internet connection. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

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Help improve Freesound and win a t-shirt!

Dear Freesounders,

As part of our research towards improving Freesound we are developing a tag recommendation system to help Freesound users tagging their sounds when they are uploaded.

Before implementing the system into Freesound we have started a testing phase in which we will compare several strategies for tag recommendation that we have developed. We will choose the best recommendation system according to your input.

For this, we kindly ask you to participate in an experiment?that we have set up at http://labs.freesound.org/tagrecommendation/. Please carefully read the instructions and follow all steps until the experiment is finished. It will take around 20 minutes.

Once we close the experiment we will randomly select two of the participants to receive a Freesound t-shirt?as a reward!

Thank you very much in advance for your participation. We believe you’ll enjoy the experiment and will be of invaluable in helping to improve Freesound.

keep on Freesounding!

ps: you can leave comments and suggestions here

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Freesound outage May 29 1 a.m. CEST

Edit: Because you can see this message it means we’re back, sooner than expected. Thank you for your patience.

Dear Freesounders,
On Wednesday May 29 at 1 a.m. CEST (28th 7 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern) Freesound will be down for a few hours while we perform some maintenance on our Internet site connection. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

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Some new features!

Hello there Freesounders!

we would like to announce that we have introduced a couple of small new features, some of them were requested in the forums.

First of all, we have increased the number of sounds that can be described per round from 4 to 10. This will be specially useful for users that tend to upload a lot of sounds at once, and will help you have your sounds described quicker.
Also to easy up the description process, you will now be able to see the description of more than one sound at a time.

We also added query term highlighting in the sound descriptions of the search results page.

Furthermore we have added some minor layout improvements, fine-tuned anti-spam measures and updated the moderation interface in order to promote oldest sounds at the beginning of the queue. This way sound moderation will become closer to “first in first out”. ?And now that I’m talking about sound moderation, don’t forget that moderators are humans and do this task voluntarily in their free time. They take this responsibility very seriously and always do the moderation as fast as they can! They deserve a biiiiig hurrayyyy from the whole Freesound community!

Said that, keep on Freesounding!

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Freesound: 8th anniversary

Today is the 8th anniversary of Freesound! Congratulations to the researchers, developers, moderators, donors and users who have been and are part of this project for the success achieved so far. Thanks to the collaboration of this great community we have now more than 160.000 free sounds from all over the world.

Freesound was started in 2005 in the Music Technology Group (MTG). One of the first aims behind it was to create an open repository of sounds to be used for scientific and artistic research, but quickly became a very popular site used by a wide variety of people to share sounds and the experiences around them.

Freesound has now 3.5 million registered users around the world, about 40.000 visits a day, and the total number of visits in those eight years has been more than 57 million, coming from almost all the countries of the world.

There are many successful usages of the sounds in Freesound, for example in the movie Children of Men and in a song of the internationally known band The Prodigy. Freesound has received several awards, such as a BMW award, a Barcelona City award and a Google research award twice. But what is most important, during all those years users have shared really amazing sounds. Find the opinion of the community about the coolest sounds on Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/

The interest for sharing sounds keeps growing and the community of active users of Freesound is also growing. For the MTG, Freesound offers an exceptional framework with which to carry research in the context of semantic web technologies. But we are specially proud of being able to offer a very useful service to the society.

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The coolest sounds on Freesound

On April 5th will be the 8th anniversary of Freesound, and thanks to your contributions more than 160,000 sounds have been shared with the community so far!

Now, the Freesound team would like to look back in the Freesound history and find some of the most original or unusual sounds that have been uploaded during all these years. That?s why we need your help:

In your opinion, which are the most amazing / surprising / coolest sounds you have ever found on Freesound?

Please leave your comments here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/

 

Thank you for all these years of cool sounds!!!

 

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Can you beat this?

We know you beatbox. Yes you… Yes, we mean YOU!
We know you beatbox in the shower, or maybe in the car (as you listen to the radio waiting for the green at the traffic lights).
Some of you are so shy you only beatbox in you head!… But you still do.

So… while I take a much needed rest from running the dares, my friend Afleetingspeck would like to get us all beatboxing.

Read the dare challenge here:
http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/33571/
and decide if you can beat it!

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Introducing Freesound Terms of Use

Hello dear Freesounders!

After almost eight years of great sounds and constant growth it has become necessary to define some terms of use for Freesound. These terms are intented to outline the legal aspects of Freesound and to clarify your rights as users, our privacy policy and, in general, to protect you and us against incorrect uses of the site.

By adding these terms of use?we have not changed the philosophy of the site. It is just a necessary step to keep on growing and improving Freesound!

In order to continue using Freesound you’ll have to accept?these terms of use. But hey, don’t worry because they are not excessively long to read and we have also created a?friendly version?of the terms which makes them much easier to understand. Here is a brief summary of the terms:

  • Uploaded sounds are released under one of the CC licenses you choose. Other content (metadata, tags, comments, etc…) is provided as CC-Zero.
  • Your activity in Freesound is public and can be seen by all users (except your private messages).
  • You are responsible for your posted content.
  • We (Freesound) keep your data confidential and apply security measures to keep this confidentiality.
  • We (Freesound) don?t warrant that all the data on the site is correct. We are not liable for information not posted by us on this site.
  • We (Freesound) may remove accounts of users that do not comply with the terms or who do not behave correctly (spam, offensive comments…).
  • We can use anonymized data collected from Freesound (statistics about sounds, tags, comments, downloads…) for research purposes.
  • You agree to receive email notifications from us.

You can read the full text and the friendly version here.

Starting tomorrow (1/3/13), the first time you log in to Freesound you’ll see a screen saying that you have to accept the terms of use before continue using Freesound. That screen will contain the same explanation you’re reading here.

Thank you for your patience and understanding! We really appreciate the commitment of the Freesound community!!!

 

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Private message spam…

Hi all,

It looks like the private message spammers have really started liking us lately. Almost daily I’m deleting spammers. For now the best is to “report as spam” as soon as you get a spam message: if more than a few people do this the person will be blocked from sending further messages immediately.

Other than this we are also looking into?severely?restricting the message-sending capabilities of people who have not done certain actions yet on the site. I won’t say which because this might be a hint for the spammers, but the idea is that if you haven’t done X or Y on the site you won’t be able to send more than X messages per minute/hour/day.

Sorry for the annoyance!

– Bram

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