Dear Freesounders,

Last year we started the tradition of publishing a sustainability report to give you an update about how things are going in the Freesound world sustainability-wise, and to give you more insight about how do we work and what makes Freesound possible. This is the second edition of the report, updated for 2019. You’ll notice that most of the information is very similar to previous year’s post but, especially for those who didn’t read the previous edition or don’t know much about Freesound, this should be an interesting read to get to know more about us.

The report is split in a number of sections discussing different aspects that contribute to the sustainability of Freesound, and a final section with a summary and some conclusions.

Sound uploads

We believe that a very important aspect of the sustainability of Freesound is the continuous uploading of new sounds by the user community. These sounds bring real value to Freesound and make it a useful resource for many users around the world. Specially good-quality sounds. The fact that Freesound is a valuable resource for many users is what is making the donation campaign a success, and what ultimately enables other types of contributions to the sustainability such as those from the university and from research grants (see below). In 2019, 41,450 sounds were uploaded. We consider this to be one of most important contributions in terms of sustainability. Similarly, other user actions like rating (168,000 new ratings in 2019) and commenting sounds (47,000 new comments), writing forum posts (1,100 forum posts) and doing sound moderation, are very important and also contribute to the sustainability of the platform. For a summary of Freesound user activity during 2019, please check the 2019 in numbers blog post that we recently published.

User donations

In terms of user donations, 2019 has been very similar to 2018, although there has been a slight increase in the total numbers. In 2019, we got 5847 donations (200 more than in 2018), totaling 48,000€ (around 2000€ more than in 2018). We expected to see a more significant increase in donations provided that we do send reminders to each donor when a year has passed since the last donation – “hi, last year you donated X to Freesound, we’re very happy about that, would you like to donate again?” – and we thought we’d see more “accumulated” users. In any case, we’re deeply thankful for all your support and donations 🙂

We spent the donations in the following development tasks:

• Improvements in the Freesound platform. For a detailed list of developments check the Community Update blog posts of May, July and December. Also you can check our the development at our source code repository. This year we have been less active in the writing of community updates. This is partially because we have been doing less user-facing development (so lots of optimizations and very technical things), and also because we’ve been spending more efforts in research activities which have not been transformed into Freesound code but that some of them eventually will 🙂
• Work on the new Freesound front-end. As I mentioned in a couple of posts this year, we are working on it but things are taking much longer than expected. We’re a very small team and have to divide our time into many activities. New frontend often does not take preference.
• Software licenses and cost of services for the help desk (Zendesk), email services (Amazon), maps services (Mapbox), and site monitoring (Site 24×7). 
  

Contribution from UPF

Freesound is an initiative of the Music Technology Group, a research group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain. In 2019, the UPF has continued contributing to Freesound similarly to previous years. UPF provides the necessary IT infrastructure and basic maintenance (15 servers, 4 TB monthly data bandwidth, IT support staff). As we calculated for the past edition of the sustainability report, the expected cost of such infrastructure if Freesound was hosted in external services (such as Amazon Web services or similar), would be over 20,000€/year for only hosting costs. This price would be about 5,000€/year by using a cheaper dedicated hosting provider, but we would also have to pay additional IT support costs in this case. Also it has to be considered that some people from the university who dedicates some time to Freesound related activities (either research, development or administration) are also paid by the university. Hence, UPF contribution is huge and we could not live without it.

Contribution from research grants

As being part of a university, research is an important element of the Freesound philosophy. During 2019, the amount of income from research grants which could impact Freesound has been drastically reduced, mostly due to the fact that the AudioCommons project finished last year. We are participating in some research grant proposals in which, if granted, Freesound related activities would take place, but this is not known as of today. However, in 2019 we got awarded a new Google Faculty Research Award which partially funded research on the development of a big dataset made with Freesound content (see this blog post). This is a continuation of a line of research that we started around 3 years ago and that had already been awarded a Google Faculty Research Award. Contributions from research grants resulted in:

• Further development of the Freesound Datasets research platform and FSD dataset.
• Further development and maintenance of Essentia, the audio analysis library that powers Freesound sound analysis
• Research on methods for automatically classifying audio events.
• Further research on clustering methods to be potentially applied to Freesound search results.
  

Commercial usage of the Freesound API

Freesound has an API endpoint which allows third parties to develop applications that incorporate Freesound content. Usage of this API is free for non-commercial purposes. Nevertheless, the commercial use of the API requires a commercial license. In this way we make sure that commercial applications using Freesound also bring something back to the community. Note that this is independent of the license of the sounds themselves, which need to be respected regardless of the API usage agreement. In 2019 our license agreements generated an income of 2,500€ (same as in 2018), but we are in negotiation phase for a couple for API clients so we hope this number will increase a bit in 2020. We spent this money in the same development efforts described in the User donations section above.

Summary and perspectives for 2020

As you can see, 2019 has been a very similar year to 2018 in terms of Freesound sustainability. It is great that we consolidated our model and know we are better aware of the expectations that we can have. We’re still far from our sustainability vision that we discussed with the community back in 2017, but we are in a good position to continue advancing. For 2020 we expect to continue in a similar line, maybe being able to turn some of the research results of last year(s) into Freesound website features and therefore spend a bit more time in development as well. If we’re able to get new research grants in which Freesound takes an important role that’d be a game changer and would allow us to do more 🙂

We’d like to finish this post by saying thank you to everyone who contributed to Freesound during 2019, in particular to those who donated and those who uploaded and moderated sounds. We’ll let you know how things go next year in 2020’s sustainability report 

frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team

[Guest Blog post by João Janz]

Before we Start…

With this post I’m aiming to try and help anyone who wants to start recording foley sounds and doesn’t have a huge budget. It’ll be a simple list of do’s and don’ts that I’ve gathered from my experience on the field. I’ll try to be as down to earth as possible because I realize that there isn’t a lot of organized information out there on this subject. If you’re a beginner, besides the “best mics” or “coolest sounds” articles on the internet, you’re not going to have much luck finding good foley recording tips unless you scour dozens of old forum threads. But don’t worry… I already did that for you!

For the sake of timekeeping, I’m going to assume you’re already acquainted with the basics of sound recording and editing, so I won’t have to explain what recording a sound is or what a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is. There are already a lot of great threads and articles on the internet about the basics of audio production you can educate yourself with. So let’s get started!

Note: All prices listed from Thomman.de except where stated and are correct as of time of writing.

Equipment

The biggest concern of recording foley on a budget is the cost of the specific equipment itself. If you’re a beginner and you already have some kind of a home studio set-up, you probably already have a microphone lying around somewhere, so you’re all set if you want to record something in your studio. But the challenge here is when you want to record something outside your studio, which realistically is what you’re going to do the most unless you have a big studio and budget, which if you do, I don’t know what you’re doing reading this!

Recording Gear

For field recording on a budget, what you want to do is get a portable recorder, which is a device that’s usually battery powered, with built-in microphones, preamps, and internal memory storage. Pricing usually ranges from relatively cheap to very expensive. The best-bang for your buck is going to be the Tascam DR-series and the popular Zoom recorders. For the entry-level models, prices start at around 100$ and can go up to 200$. But you have to be careful when choosing one of these recorders because sometimes the product specifications you find online don’t tell the whole story. You should look for a recorder that can record stereo at a 48 kHz / 24-bit quality because that is the industry standard. You should also look for one whose preamps generate a low self-noise level as it can make a world of difference especially later during the editing process. You’ll find it described as EIN A-Weighted (check this list out: http://www.avisoft.com/recorder-tests/). The lower the number the better, for example -120 dB is better than -110 dB. This is what sets apart the cheaper recorders from the mid-range recorders in my experience. You might spend a few extra bucks on a recorder – but trust me – it will be worth the extra sound quality. In terms of the type of microphone itself it doesn’t make much difference because most recorders have internal small diaphragm condensers anyway. Later on, you might think of expanding your field recording arsenal like getting a shotgun mic, which has an extremely unidirectional polar pattern useful for recording very specific sounds in a “crowded” area. If you want to future-proof yourself, get a portable recorder with extra XLR mic inputs, so you can record using your devices internal mics, pre-amps with potentially any other consumer microphone, all at the same time! Just be wary that some microphones (typically condensers) require extra voltage power to operate so you’ll have to get a portable recorder that comes with a 48V Phantom Power switch. Besides these, any complementary features like internal mixing options, effects or wireless file transferring are just welcome bonuses. And in practical terms, storage and battery life shouldn’t be a concern. Just keep an extra SD memory card and batteries on hand if you’re out in the wilderness recording hours of ambience or if you’re using more than two mics.

My Recommendations:

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Headphones & Accessories

As for other equipment, you should get a good pair of closed-back headphones to check what sounds you want to record and to balance the gain levels without outside interference. If you’re field recording (or sometimes even indoors) you definitely have to get a wind jammer/shield or else you’ll find that, more often than not, your recordings will be all unusable. I also advise getting a mic stand. Any stand will work better than having to improvise laying the recorder on some unstable surface. You can pick-up a lot of unwanted rumbling and noise this way.

 My Recommendations:

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PC Hardware & Workstations 

At this point, I’m going to assume you have a computer, as pretty much everyone in the 21^st century has one. Any notebook or gaming PC will work fine, and if you already are an audio/music production enthusiast, chances are you already have your personal workstation.  For foley editing and mixing, computer specification requirements are minimal, and you’ll even get decent performance with a 2-core CPU and 4 GBs of RAM. That is unless you’re working with dozens of audio tracks and stuffing each one full of insert plugins. But if you’re in the market for a budget PC, my minimum recommendation would be a quad-core CPU and 8 GBs of RAM. If you got an extra $100, get an eight-core CPU and 16 GBs RAM. Stick to AMD, as they are today the best value for workstation parts.

Examples:

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 Audio Interface 

The audio interface is an essential part of any producer’s workstation but starting out you’ll get plenty of mileage using your computer’s integrated sound card. There is a slight difference in quality though and I recommend you get one when you can. Without one, you also won’t be able to make quality recordings directly to your computer’s DAW using a traditional XLR microphone. Meanwhile, just use your portable recorder, which basically is an audio interface in itself. I would recommend an USB powered audio interface with at least 48 kHz / 24-bit recording/playback ability, a headphone jack output, a stereo output and two XLR inputs/pre-amps with 48V Phantom. You can find this setup for dirt cheap and it will last you for years and years, unless of course, you feel like you need to upgrade.

My Recommendations:

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 Software  

Digital Audio Workstations

In terms of software, you’re going to want a DAW with good editing capabilities. On paper, even a free audio editing program like Audacity can handle the worst foley editing session you could throw at it but you’ll want use a DAW whose strong points will enable you to maximize your workflow. When editing big foley sessions you’ll want to be as effective as possible to save time. And time is money.  So I would recommend investing in a tried and tested DAW. Pro Tools is the industry standard but it is very expensive and unless you’re aspiring to work for a professional studio you can bypass it at this stage. Any one of the popular DAW’s like Logic, Cubase or Ableton Live (the one I use) will work fine, each one with its advantages and disadvantages. For the budget-minded, I would recommend Reaper (60$) which is a powerful and versatile recording software with amazing customer support. There are some other free options to consider like Pro Tools First, Cubase LE or Ableton Live Lite, but you’ll be quite limited in one way or another.

Effects & Plugins 

As for mixing/editing plugins, you can easily make a living out of your DAW’s stock plugins or the tons of free plugins available (check out vst4free.com). Realistically, for foley, you’ll only need some Equalization, Filtering, the occasional Gating or, if you need to get more creative, some Reverb, Delay, or other time/pitch-based effects.

What you should look into is getting a good de-noising software plugin. Izotope’s RX series is the industry standard and it comes as a package with other audio treatment plugins, but even with different options at different price points, it can be a bit pricey ($129). There are some free De-noiser plugins like ReaFIR by Cockos  or Redunoise by Voxengo that will get you the job done though. Be it the pre-amp’s self-noise or a random unexpected sound, you could easily run into issues on your recordings. While some purists despise relying on post-processing software plugins to get a perfect recording, you as a budget-minded person without the best equipment around, should adopt a middle-of-the-road approach to field recording and always have your trusty de-noiser on hand. It will take care of the issues that will eventually arise because of your inexperience and or just plain bad luck.

Field Recording

Preparation & Approach

Now that you got all the equipment, the first thing you have to do is make a list of what sounds you want to record and assess the location itself. Good preparation is the key for a productive field-recording session. Constantly check the weather for anomalies – wind and rain are your enemies, unless that’s exactly what you want. Also try to choose a spot that’s far away from anything that might ruin your recordings. Bird chips might ruin your “Urban City Ambience” just like distant car traffic and horns might ruin your “Nature Ambiences”. It all depends on what you want to capture and a good trick is to always record primary sounds. Depending on what you’re focusing on, there are always primary and secondary sounds in any given soundscape. A good example is when you’re recording your washing machine and you hear your next-door neighbors arguing. The washing machine sound is your primary, and your neighbors are secondary. If by any chance you do want to create a soundscape of people arguing next to a washing machine then you can always add those separate elements later. This will allow for a larger degree of control and thus better sound quality. So, always record specific sounds in isolation and then combine them together in post to create the perfect soundscape! A sound-clip of a cat meowing during a thunderstorm would be useless… but awesome.

Pressing Record

As for the recording itself, it’s quite straightforward. Put on your headphones and place the recorder somewhere secure where you can perfectly hear the source of the sound and don’t have any other interfering sounds or noises. Then set the gain as high as you can without it peaking, then lower it a couple of dBs to find that sweet spot. If the gain is too high, it will distort and create unwanted artifacts. If the recorder is too far away from the source, the pre-amps self-noise will ruin your recording (more on that later). After all that you can press record and do your magic!

It is wise to record as many variations as possible on the same sound so you can have the luxury of choosing the best sounds later on. You’re also going to be surprised, especially starting out, at the amount of recordings that get ruined by things you didn’t even notice at the time. If you’re recording sounds that you know are going to be repeated a lot, like footsteps or weapon sounds, it’s best to get slight variations as well. If you use the same sounds over and over it will sound robotic and create what’s known as the machine-gun effect.

You should also name your clips appropriately so later on when you’re editing them you know exactly what you’re doing. I didn’t do this myself at the beginning, and trust me, when you record hundreds of sounds, you’re not going to remember whether this sound came from a wool sweater or a polyester shirt. So just record yourself saying what you’re about to capture at the beginning of each clip.

Space & Acoustics

I also want to mention something about acoustics and reverberation. Whenever inside, try to record in “dry” places. This means rooms with little echo. If you don’t have an acoustically treated room, usually a small room filled with furniture will do great as all those materials will absorb and diffuse those nasty reflections and create a dryer sound with a more even frequency response. The idea here is to give your recording a blank acoustic canvas so later on you can just add your own digital reverb to make it match the soundscape you’re looking for. If you record different foley in various rooms with drastically different acoustics, your final mix is going to sound off. But of course, this all depends on what you’re going for.

Post-Production

After you’re done recording and you’re back in your studio, you’re going to have to edit and mix all those sounds. This is considered as the worst part in foley recording as it can get quite boring and monotonous. So, there are a few things you should do to make this task as fast and pain-free as possible.

Editing 

Workflow is king! Workflow basically means your method of work and your micromanaging preferences which over time impact your efficiency. It differs from person to person but there are a few universal things that you should abide by. You must know your DAW inside out! This means its strengths, its flaws, and more importantly, its shortcuts! You’re going to be doing a ton of cutting, zooming in/out, fading in/out, crossfading, exporting/bouncing, consolidating, creating tracks, deleting, grouping, you name it. You should know all this like the palm of your hand so you can be as efficient as possible with your time.

In your DAW, drag each clip inside an audio track and name them accordingly so you don’t get lost. After that, you’re going to edit out all the stuff you’re not interested: bad recordings, secondary sounds, artifacts, weird noises, etc. and you should be left with the good stuff. If you want, you can do an extra screening and pick the variations you like best. When editing, a good use of fades and crossfades goes a long way on making a recording sound clean. If you’re editing longer recordings like ambiences and you end up with multiple splits because you had to cut out unwanted artifacts or sounds, you can seemlessly re-join these clips by overlapping both ends and creating crossfades. With short clips, you can also easily control the attack and release of a sound by simply playing around with the fade in/out. Check out the picture below.

Mixing

After the simple but tedious editing stage you can start mixing. This is where you gain-stage, filter out all the frequencies that don’t matter, and de-noise. You’ll often find that most recordings have a low frequency rumble that just serves to muddy up your mix. This is mostly caused by wind and distant noise and can be rid of with a simple High-Pass Filter. Always leave a bit of silence or background noise on your recordings for the de-noiser algorithm to use (if you’re using RX7). You can also use time and pitch-based effects like reverbs, delays and pitch-shifters for a more creative approach. Go crazy! This part is definitely the most fun and you’ll be amazed by how many different sounds you can create by simply turning a few knobs.

Exporting

Now back to the tedious part. If you’re creating foley packs for other people to use, exporting your sounds is more important than you think. This is when you decide how people will first see and interact with them. There mainly two approaches here: either you export every single file separately; or you consolidate sounds together and export them as bigger clips with the variations together. Obviously, exporting separate files takes a lot more work but in the end it is down to how you want people to see your work. The industry standard is to group sounds together so you get the different variations in one file, but personally, I prefer to upload my sounds separately on Freesound and create packs afterwards so people can download the specific variations of the sounds they like. Appropriately naming your exported files is crucial. There is a great article on this subject which elaborates on the importance of naming better than I can. You can check it out here.

As for the file format, the standard is a .WAV file at 24-bit bit-depth and 48 kHz sample rate. But if you’re working for someone else on a project ask them what file format they want. Often times, companies that work with limited hardware like handheld devices will ask for a lower quality format (16-bit 44.1 kHz) or sometimes even .MP3.

Finishing Up!

And that’s it! You can now call yourself a successful foley artist and sound designer. Just keep at it you’ll eventually get even better results. I hope this guide helped you in some way or another but remember: There are no strict rules; these are just guidelines to help you on your way! Your motto should always be: If it sounds good, then it is good!

João Janz’s biography:

João Janz is a professional music producer with a passion for post-production audio design such as video games, film and television! Throughout his career, his aim has been to combine his sensibilities as an audio professional with his devotion to art and the creative process in an effort to produce something akin to the wonderful pieces of art that inspired him to take on this path. Between recording nature soundscapes and composing epic orchestral pieces, João has made a carrer as a versatile music composer, sound designer and foley artist. He enjoys spending his free time uploading random foley sounds on Freesound hoping to help people with their passion projects!

Based in Lisbon, Portugal, with spanish, austrian and italian roots, he currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Popular Music Production from the Southampton Solent University and looks forward to continuing his studies with a Master’s Degree in Music Composing as part of the many challenges to come!

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This was a Freesound guest blog post. Do you have any project or something you’d like to share in the Freesound Blog? Let us know using our contact form

[Guest blog post by Erokia]

Ambient Waves/Soundscapes/Elementary Wave: These types of sounds are mostly designed to add color or atmosphere to scenes in film, music, or many other possible scenarios. Objectively, they can universally fit into almost any project or musically add color to any mix. If you listen closely to some films or music you can hear stretched audio/sounds being used. Stretching audio is strangely immense if you listen closely for it in films and music.

Examples:

Over the course of the next few months or so I’ll be detailing my sound adventures and describing the process of which on how I make my sounds and hopefully so you can too deploy my simple techniques on making some interesting sounds yourself.

For this blog post I’d like to share with you a detailed description/tutorial on creating ambient waves/pads/soundscapes. It is a relatively easy process and I’ll try to be as thorough as possible. Alternatively, you may watch this Youtube video I made detailing the process quickly.

These types of sounds such as ambient waves are technically called Pads or, Soundscapes but for all intents and purposes I wanted to have my own original name for a sound that would still sound like it would fit in that ambient waves/soundscape/pads category.

When I started uploading to Freesound, I started experimenting with piano recordings I made and cutting them up, rearranging them and applying basic effects/VSTs that came bundled with the purchase of FL Studio. There are many excellent methods to chopping up sounds and I would recommend using Kontakt or in FL Studio, slicer or sliceX. If so, I would highly recommend searching the web for ways of chopping/slicing audio into small segments in your preferred DAW of choice. You can create your own sound however you like if you have the equipment or sounds to do so and go straight to stretching.

The best way to start experimenting with chopping up a sound for an ambient wave sound is to start with something that has no distortion, over saturation or any sound artifacts for that matter, as in the end, the sound will be odd and messy in the final process of stretching. You should however, experiment with any sounds you can think of that would sound good stretched, you would be surprised by what the results can be.

Find a piano loop, Rhodes piano, soft ambient pad synth or anything you can think of that would sound simple when stretched, it could even be a guitar, a man or women singing, a passing car, the possibilities are endless. The sound must have clear note hits so that the chopping software knows where to chop the sound at each note or you can manually play a rhythm on a keyboard and record it.

Apply reverb to the sound if you wish and begin creating a rhythm. Be sure that when creating the rhythm that you do not leave notes too far between each other unless you want a long silence between them when stretched. Do not over do the reverb or you will loose the bassy-ness and clarity of the sound when stretched. Use delay if you wish but do so somewhat sparingly as that to can affect the sound somewhat negatively; depending on the type of sound. Obviously the best method is to just go wild and experiment, randomly press a bunch of notes even if it sounds odd.

Once you have found a nice rhythm or an experimental sound then you can go on to stretching the audio. There are many ways of stretching sounds obviously, but the best and most effective way to make an interesting stretched sound is to use Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch. Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch is free and is very simple to use. It can look intimidating at first based on first appearances, but is a easy program to understand.

I will be stretching this sound as it is. You can find the original here:

On the top left of the program click “File”. Then click “Open Audio File”. Navigate to where your sound/loop or whatever sound you have that you wish to stretch is and click it. The program will immediately have it stretched already and you can just click play on the bottom left of the program to hear it. Sometimes this is enough for the sound to be stretched but if you wish to have it stretched more then you can go ahead and do so by dragging the slider to the right where it says “stretch” under the parameters tab on the top left.

This program has processing features that can apply Harmonics, pitch shift, octave mixer, filter/bandstop, tonal/noise, compressor, freq shift, spread, bandwidth, and volume.
I recommend just finding what sounds good and leaving it at that, I rarely use any of these extra features.

Once you have the desired stretched sound then you can click the tab that says “Write to file”. Click/check box under Render Selection that says 32bit for highest quality. Then finally click “Render Selection…”. You will have to find a place where to put the sound and manually type in a file name in the new window where it says filename: at the bottom. Once done, just click Render and it is all done.

Here is the final sound:

You have now learned how I have been making Ambient stretched sounds for years.
It is a very easy thing to do and there are countless experimental sounds to use in this program from field recordings, to voices/acapellas or any kind of instrument you can think of that may sound incredible if stretched. I really hope that this quick tutorial will be of help and wish to hear more amazing sounds from the community.

To finish this post, here is a personal note about how I feel about stretching audio and making ambient pads/waves.

I created these sounds for the purpose of helping me in my life to deal with depression, anxiety, stress, and basically boredom. I felt that if it helps me, I felt it should help whoever may feel the same. As Freesound continues to grow I hope to see more diversity in sounds coming forth.

Wish to say thanks to Frederic Font Corbera for giving me the opportunity to share this tutorial and to the creator of Pauls Extreme Time Stretch “Nasca Octavian” for limitless fun in sound design. Wish to finally say thanks to the Freesound community for all the sounds, feedback and inspirations. Freesound wouldn’t be here without you folks.

Keep on Freesounding.

J.P/Erokia

Jordan Powell’s Biography

Jordan Powell has been uploading/sharing his sounds on Freesound.org since 2013. Sounds that he uploads mostly consist of the electronica/downtempo/lofi genre and have been featured in a small number of TV shows, documentaries, and shorts stories on Youtube and as well with aspiring musicians. He mostly self taught himself on making sounds and by watching many tutorials online to help shape the sound design style he has today. Besides sharing his sounds on Freesound.org, he is also in the crude oil trucking transport industry and drives at least 600 miles everyday enjoying the east Texas sunset and making sure you get the gas for your vehicle.

Jordan is also a Freesound.org sound moderator and helps out with making sure the right sounds get on the site.

When all is done, he just wishes to create that next interesting sound that hopefully will be incredibly useful to who ever stumbles upon it.

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This was a Freesound guest blog post. Do you have any project or something you’d like to share in the Freesound Blog? Let us know using our contact form

[Guest blog post by Craig Smith]

In August of 2018, I uploaded 1,233 vintage optical sound effects from various Hollywood productions ranging from the 1930s to 1950s. I called the collection “the Gold Library” because of the color of the old Dyno label-maker tapes on the boxes. 

Since then, I have continued to preserve the former USC optical sound effects library. And now I’m extremely happy to present the next collection of 1,554 classic sound effects: The Red Library.

Where did these come from?

To recap, I acquired these sounds from the USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive in 2016, just before they were to be thrown away. They are first generation full-track 1/4” tape transfers of 35mm optical sound effects. For more information on this project, Please see my February 2019 Blog post:  https://blog.freesound.org/?p=901)

What’s the difference between the Gold and Red Libraries?

Although the specific origins of these sounds are mostly lost, It has become clear to me that the Gold effects were mostly clean “master” effects that were used to print copies to be cut into a film’s soundtrack. The effects in this new Red Library are not as clean, and have many splices, indicating they have been a direct part of the editing process. I’ve nicknamed this library “the workbench collection,” because these sounds are clearly leftovers from several Hollywood productions.

What’s the difference between master and working copies?

Until the mid 1950s, sounds for film were recorded onto 35mm film by modulating a beam of light.

This was a delicate process that required extremely accurate exposure and developing. These tracks could be either variable area or variable density. Both had advantages and disadvantages.

These master tracks would then be duplicated for editors, cut into individual sounds, and wound into small rolls held by rubber bands or paper tape. They were then placed into “trim boxes” for easy access.

The sounds could be retrieved by editors and edited on a Moviola editing machine As they cut effects, they would return the leftover bits, the “trims”, to the trim boxes.

The sounds were edited onto reels that were then put onto reels and loaded onto “dubbers” for final mixing.

This system worked well, except that every optical generation created more noise, loss of high-end, and distortion. Since the prints shown in theaters were many generations removed from the original recordings, precision in every step was incredibly important.

What happened in the editing room?

Sound editors loved to collect their favorite sounds so they could use them again and again. Sometimes they would print more copies of a sound than they needed. Everyone was fine with this, but making copies of copies could lead to degraded sound quality. They also would take the trims with them at the end of a production, even though they might be full of audible splices. 

Another thing editors did was to install “portable” optical cameras in the edit room to speed up the process.

This was likely to introduce ground noise, and intermodulation distortion due to improper exposure.

So how does the Red Library sound then?

Pretty good, actually!

My original intent with this project was to preserve, not restore. But I realized that many of these sounds needed a little help. So I did some minimal restoration including hum and hiss reduction, reduction of distortion, and splice repair (gaps and clicks). Since there are over 1,500 effects in this library, the time spent on each effect was limited. But I’m happy with the results. These are very usable sounds that you won’t find anywhere else. And they layer very well with modern digital effects.

So what’s next?

There is a lot more sound to recover in this project. The Red and Gold libraries were the easy stuff. Beyond this, I’m dealing with tapes that are badly shrunken, and tapes that have sticky-shed syndrome. Since I’m the one doing the transfers, I don’t know when I will have more to share. But I know there’s good stuff in those tapes, and I’ll find a way to recover it.

Again, I want to thank those whose support has kept me going on this project: Peder Jørgensen, Christian Schaanning, Leanna Kaiser, Jesse Smith, Dino Everett, Ben Burtt, Frederic Font, Randy Haberkamp, and Lynn Becker.

And a reminder to tell all your friends: Whenever you record a cool sound, upload it to Freesound! It’s the quickest and easiest way to achieve immortality!

—Craig Smith

Craig Smith’s Biography

Craig Smith has been recording and manipulating sound since 1964. After graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, he worked as a sound editor and production mixer in Hollywood, specializing in noisy action-adventure films that are blamed for the downfall of society. He left that world in 1986 to teach at California Institute of the Arts, where he is now Academic Sound Coordinator in the School of Film/Video.

Craig’s own work experiments with implied narrative and accidental sound design – putting together sounds & images that have nothing to do with each other to create unexpected stories.

Craig is a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and the Audio Engineering Society.

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This was a Freesound guest blog post. Do you have any project or something you’d like to share in the Freesound Blog? Let us know using our contact form

Hi everyone,

A new year has started and here is our traditional year in numbers post in which we give you some statistics about last year’s Freesound activity. As usual, we will show some general statistics similar to those shown in previous years’ posts, and also extend a bit on a specific topic which, in this year’s post, is about uploaders. But let’s get started! The number of new sounds uploaded during 2019 was…

41,450 new sounds!

which corresponds to…

772 hours of audio!

Wow! That’s around 5,000 more sounds and 85 more hours of audio compared with 2018. Fun fact, the average sound length for 2019 is somewhere between that of 2017 and 2018, but the overall tendency we observed last year of recently uploaded sounds being longer than those uploaded years ago, still seems to be a thing. Any ideas why this could be the case?

Let’s move to something else. Here is the distribution of licenses of these 41k newly uploaded sounds:

Pretty similar to last year’s distribution, which in its turn was quite similar to the previous year’s distribution (but not quite the same as the year before that!). In summary, Creative Commons 0 is still by far the most used license.

In total, Freesound currently hosts an amazing total of 441,075 sounds, very close to the 450k mark! 🎉 Here is the evolution of the total number of sounds since the beginning of Freesound, and a prediction for the future:

Yeah, going strong! The prediction seems to indicate we might pass 500k uploaded sounds by the end of 2020. We might need some big collections to be uploaded because it looks like the prediction is biased because of the huge modular samples library uploaded in 2015 (see the more stepped line in the middle of the plot). But hey, why not? Let me dare you all to get Freesound to 500k uploaded sounds in 2020!

And now to another classic statistic from this series of posts: to listen to the whole Freesound recordings would now require 274 days and 6 hours of your life. Not bad huh? This is unless you use the <shameless self promotion mode on> Freesound Timeline app which will allow you to go much faster 😉 <shameless self promotion mode off>.

The newly uploaded 41,450 sounds in 2019 conform a very similar tag cloud to that of last year:

Again, there seems to be balance between field-recording and related tags on the one hand (ambient, soundscape), and music related tags on the other (synth, loop, percussion). Also, there are some generic tags like synth, effect, and, of course, sound, which are also used a lot. Interestingly enough, two very specific tags appear reasonably sized in the tag cloud above: czech and panska. These are all used for sounds uploaded by users with similar names. I imagine this is part of some assignment in an educational programme in the Czech Republic. Maybe from this school? If someone knows more, tell us in the comments! Those sounds add up to almost 3,000 and the audio is great! (but descriptions could definitely be better, hmmm…). Here’s one nice example:

Now let’s talk about uploaders. Uploaders, meaning the users that have uploaded at least 1 sound to Freesound, represent approximately the 2‰ of registered Freesound users. What? Note that ‰ (per-mille) is not % (per-cent). This means that only 2 out of every 1000 users have uploaded at least one sound. This is a rather unbalanced ratio, but it is in fact quite similar to what’s found in other websites where users upload content: the number of consumers is always much much much larger than the number of producers. This makes Freesound’s 24k uploaders its scarcest yet most precious asset 🙂 Let’s look into how many sounds are uploaded by each of the uploaders:

This histogram should be read like “more than 60% of the uploaders in Freesound have uploaded less than 5 sounds”, “around 10% of the uploaders have contributed between 5 and 8 sounds”, “5% of the uploaders have uploaded between 9 and 12 sounds ” and so on. The average is of 18.5 sounds per uploader. This means that there are a lot of users who upload few sounds, and few users who upload a lot of sounds. Again, a classic behaviour observed in user contributing websites like Freesound. And who are these few users who uploaded lots of sounds during 2019? See here the ranking of uploaders by number of sounds and by duration:

	Username	# uploaded sounds		Username	uploaded time (hours)
#1	Erokia	2814	#1	W1ZY	63
#2	PhonosUPF	1776	#2	klankbeeld	39
#3	craigsmith	1554	#3	awaka	26
#4	Joao_Janz	1309	#4	janrou	24
#5	proyectosonidosias	697	#5	kevp888	19
#6	nereatruiz	508	#6	ayamahambho	16
#7	klankbeeld	323	#7	craigsmith	12
#8	SpaceJoe	303	#8	felix.blume	11
#9	_Linus_Sebastian	280	#9	kyles	10
#10	Tom_McLaughlin	276	#10	tim.kahn	10
#11	awaka	273	#11	FREITOJOS	9
#12	bitlab_coop	260	#12	gis_sweden	9
#13	toiletrolltube	257	#13	Erokia	9
#14	soneproject	252	#14	richwise	8
#15	Roses1401	235	#15	inchadney	8
#16	lidem_soundfx	206	#16	wjoojoo	7
#17	kevp888	202	#17	Roses1401	7
#18	kyles	201	#18	bitlab_coop	7
#19	MATTIX	189	#19	toiletrolltube	6
#20	aabbccddee123	189	#20	MBARI_MARS	6

Some quick notes about this ranking:

• We have Erokia back in the 1st position in the ranking by # uploaded sounds! Also worth mentioning that Erokia is also now part of the awesome team of Freesound moderators 🎉
• You might find it suspicious that PhonosUPF is in the second position (for those who don’t know, Phonos is a foundation linked to the Music Technology Group, where we make Freesound). Well, this is because Phonos is uploading all sorts of instrument sound transformations that were produced during a lifelong career of one of its members, electronic music pioneering in Barcelona. Thanks!
• You might recognize the name of craigsmith from the USC optical sound effects library he started uploading last year. He’s back with more rescued sounds form Hollywood studios, but he’ll tell more you about this in an upcoming blog post.

Looking at the ranking by duration we also see some all time great contributors like klankbeeld, felix.blume, tim.kahn, kyles, and also other names that repeat from previous years ranking (awaka, kevp888, janrou, …). Thanks everyone for your contributions, that’s what really makes Freesound awesome!

Let’s continue with some quick numbers about downloads. The number of sound downloads (including packs) during 2019 was…

20,624,811 downloads!

That’s a new record, 1.6M more downloads than last year:

All in all, users have downloaded more than 149M sounds from Freesound! Here is the classic cloud of query terms that are used by Freesound users when searching for sounds:

As you can see it is very very very similar (if not exactly the same) as last year’s one, with wind, music, explosion in the top positions. Also, the interest for piano and car that started last year has been maintained. Surely a lot of interesting information to dig in to here, but now it’s not the time. Maybe in next year’s post!

And to finish the post, let’s now see some more general statistics. In 2019, you sent 19k messages, wrote 1.1k forum posts and made 47k sound comments. Again, very similar numbers to those of 2018. The good news is that sound ratings maintain the increasing tendency of last years, with a total of 168k sound ratings in 2019, 10k more than last year.

That’s it for 2019 in numbers post! Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy a 2020 full of sounds 🙂

frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team

Hi everyone,

Welcome to a new community update! Yeah we know, we have not been updating you very regularly lately, but this does not mean we have not been working hard on Freesound. As has been the case for the last year, we have been very much concentrated on working on either under the hood improvements, or research type of issues which do not have a clearly visible output in the Freesound website (yet). But we are indeed working on great things which will definitely end up in the platform 🙂 Here’s a summary of our current main working threads:

• Bug fixes, general maintenance and software updates: this is a big one, as we are about to carry out necessary software updates (for nerds: Python, Django updates…) which affect all of our codebase and are therefore quite time consuming.
• New features: we’re working on new features mostly related to the search page. However all these new features require a lot of previous research work (don’t forget we’re a research institution, so that’s what we do best!), and again features need their time to become a reality. The new search features we’re working on will allow to cluster search results as well as add new filtering options.
• New fronted: yes, we have not abandoned this one. It is going very slowly, much more than we thought, but it will eventually become a reality and it is indeed in our roadmap.

Oh and by the way, we just published a tech-oriented post about Freesound in the Creative Commons Open Source blog, you might want to check it out 🙂

Aaaaand that’s it for the short update. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the updates in the coming year. Big happy new year to everyone!

The Freesound Team

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

[Guest blog post by Robert Manzke alias rma31]

Hi, my name is Robert, some 6 years back I have founded the academic working group “Creative Technologies AG” (CTAG) at Kiel University of Applied Sciences in Germany.
In the domain of Audio, we engage students and form international collaborations.
Our focus is music technology and production, sound synthesis and design and adjacent areas such as electronics, computer graphics, algorithms, related hard- and software, maker technologies, human machine interaction, immersive art and media and so forth…

Also, I got my first Freesound t-shirt on June 2nd 2009 and have always been a great fan of the Freesound idea, to create a social and open platform for sounds and its use in science and education.

Since the existence of CTAG, there have been several student teams involved with the Freesound API to interact with the sound data base. Most notable results include the Beaglebone single board computer based sampler “Beagle Boom” and, very recently, the Eurorack sample streaming module “CTAG Strämpler”:

CTAG Strämpler (half streamer, half sampler therefore “Strämpler”, which is close to the German word “Strampler” meaning romper suit) is an electronic sound synthesis module designed for Eurorack modular synthesizers.
Most importantly, it has internet access with connectivity to the Freesound API, making the Freesound sound data base accessible through hardware. One can download sounds to the module’s SD-card and play them back as two separate voices.
Typical parameters such as pitch and amplitude can be influenced, just like one would do with a sampler. It includes a comprehensive control voltage (CV) matrix, where external CV signals can modulate various sound parameters. Some basic effects such as a stereo delay and low/highpass filters are implemented as well.

The firmware and the DIY hardware design are entirely open source and available on Github. CTAG is currently looking for collaborators to further develop the Strämpler. One highly desired feature would be the ability to sample your own sounds within your Eurorack setup with Strämpler and share them instantly on Freesound, actively contributing to the sound data base. More details can be found on hackaday and the projects web-page.

Both above mentioned projects were related to hard/software projects by students as part of their regular curriculum. Doing such practical projects allows us to teach students immediate application of web-programming (Freesound API), time-critical real-time audio programming and application of digital signal processing, soft/hardware UI design and implementation, hardware near programming and design, debugging of complex systems etc. Students greatly deepen their abilities during these practical projects and are highly engaged. They also learn how to reach out and inform the world about their work (social media, github, Freesound, open source concepts, etc.).

Apart from the Freesound related project, there have been numerous other projects at CTAG, mostly with a strong penchant towards the open source community; our purpose is to give back knowledge to the society as being associated with a public university in Germany. Students also benefit of a continuously growing pool of partnerships with other academic institutions (Erasmus+ exchange) and private companies. CTAG is also a strong advocate for startups in the music-tech domain and we are proud to have helped Instruments of Things to become alive.

We always look for opportunities to collaborate and wish to further support Freesound with our applied research, just get in touch with us 🙂 …

— Robert Manzke

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Robert Manzke developed his passion for electronic music starting age 5 (the record was Vangelis Heaven and Hell, his first synth was a Korg Poly 61).
It lead him to successfully study electrical engineering and digital signal processing. He obtained a Ph.D. in computational imaging sciences at King’s College London in 2004 and worked for Philips Research USA in the field of medical imaging afterwards.
He left that field in 2012 and joined Kiel University of Applied Sciences as Professor for Ubiquitous Computing. Since then he focuses on his passion of music technology within the Creative Technologies working group (CTAG).

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This was a Freesound guest blog post. Do you have any project or something you’d like to share in the Freesound Blog? Let us know using our contact form

Hi everyone!

It’s been some time since the last community update, but we’ve kept you busy with other kinds of very interesting blog posts so you’ll hopefully have not noticed 🙂 Anyway, here is a summary of the latest updates that we released to Freesound:

• Many improvements in the audio processing back end. This will allow us to process sound more often and carrying out more advanced audio analysis to enable new search features.
• Show a warning when entering tags that contain letters other than a-z and numbers. This restriction was already in place but no proper feedback was shown to users.
• Fixed a number of bugs in forums which resulted in wrong forum post counts when searching in the forums.
• Improvements in spam checks.
• New components implemented for the upcoming Beast Whoosh interface. Nothing public yet.
• Many minor bug fixes and optimizations.

As usual, for a more techy and detailed list of code changes, you can check our source code repository. That’s it for now, enjoy Freesound!

– The Freesound Team

Hi Freesounder!

The Music Technology Group is the research institute based in Barcelona, Spain, that has created, maintains and keeps supporting Freesound for now over 10 years. MTG is turning 25 this year and we will be presenting Freesound as one of the most important projects to come out of the MTG since its inception.

To highlight the diversity of uses of Freesound we would like to ask you if you or someone you know ever used Freesound in any “out of the ordinary” situations. We have asked this kind of question before and heard about people using Freesound to explain to teachers how children with autism experience sound, how dogs can be desensitized to thunder, to provide a soothing song-bird ambience at a child’s burial, how a scream recorded by a student in his bedroom made it to a Hollywood blockbuster, … and many more of these amazing stories.

To help us discover some more of these out of the ordinary uses, please tell us your story in this forum thread 🙂

With love,

The Freesound Team