Dear Freesounders,

Here we are back with some more news about things happening in the Freesound dev world! We have just released a couple of new features and have been working on a big third new feature but that won’t finally make it until next month. These are the  newly introduced features:

• New maps: we’ve just got brand new fresh maps! We switched to a new maps provider called Mapbox (which uses some imagery data from OpenStreetMap) and have taken the opportunity to add some improvements to the way maps work in Freesound. If you go to the sounds map page you’ll notice that, besides the new icons for sounds and clusters, the maps now show terrain labels to easily locate places, and there is a search bar that you can use to enter locations and fly to these in the map. That’s a huge usability improvement as in old maps you had to manually navigate to whatever place in the world you wanted to hear sounds from 🙂 This search bar has also been added to the small map that you use to add geotags when describing your sounds.Together with these improvements we also improved map share links and map embeds. To share map with a link, you can now simply copy the link from the address bar while you’re browsing in the map page. Map embeds now have extra options that allow you to choose the size of the embed and to decide whether you want sounds to be clustered (or not). This is particularly useful for projects that use Freesound map embeds like Sons de Barcelona.

Sounds of Amsterdam

Sounds of New Zealand

• Simpler registration page: believe it or not, we spend a lot of time answering support requests from users that have trouble registering. We detected that our login form was a bit problematic sometimes gave rather confusing messages about the status of the registration process. That’s why we decided to fix it and we have now a brand new and much simpler form that hopefully will reduce the number of support requests we get from registration. Ah, and we also took the opportunity to get rid of the first name and last name fields which we actually never used and don’t store anymore 🙂

As usual, we have also been working and released a number of fixes and improvements:

• Fixes in moderation pages
• Improve cache invalidation for sound pages: to save some efforts to our servers we use caching. This means that there are portions of the HTML we render that are not computed every time you request them but that are already cached and reused for everyone. It can happen that sometimes the cached pages go out of sync with the real data in Freesound. We have improved the mechanisms to invalidate cache so that these will be better in sync with Freesound.
• Fix a bug in sound comment email notifications which in some situations was ignoring user email preferences.
• Improved sync between our stored counts of downloads per user and the actual real numbers.

That’s it for now, enjoy Freesound!

The Freesound Team

Dear Freesounders,

Today we are very happy to introduce you to Freesound Datasets, a new platform that we’ve been developing during the last year to foster the re-use of Freesound content in research contexts and that will eventually help us make Freesound better and better. Curious? Check out the website at https://datasets.freesound.org/.

But what exactly is a dataset? To say it short, a dataset is a collection of items (sounds) annotated with labels chosen from a limited vocabulary of concepts. Well-curated datasets are one of the most important things that are needed to advance research in many fields, including sound and music related research.

Freesound Datasets is a platform that allows users to explore the contents of datasets made with Freesound sounds. But even more importantly, Freesound Datasets allows anyone to help make the datasets better by providing new annotations. Furthermore, it also promotes discussion about the datasets that it hosts, and allows (or better said, will allow) anyone to download different timestamped versions of them. If you’d like a more academic description about the platform, you can check out this paper we presented at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference last year: Freesound Datasets: A Platform for the Creation of Open Audio Datasets.

Using Freesound Datasets, we already started creating a first dataset which we called FSD. FSD is a big, general-purpose dataset composed of Freesound content and annotated with labels from Google’s AudioSet Ontology (a vocabulary of more than 600 sound classes). Currently, FSD is still much smaller than what we would like, but we are sure with the help of people all around the world it will get bigger and bigger. Needless to say, you are more than welcome to contribute to it (or in other words, please contribute!). All you need to do is visit the Freesound Datasets website and click on Get started with our annotation tasks! We will simply ask you to listen to some sounds and have fun 🙂 You’ll see an interface like this (you can login with your Freesound credentials):

That’s really cool, isn’t it!?

Yeah that’s awesome, take me to this interface because I can’t wait any longer to start annotating!

But you know what? There is even more! We have been awarded a Google Faculty Research Award to support the development of Freesound Datasets and FSD, and, in relation to that, have started a collaboration with some colleagues from Google’s Machine Perception Team to do research on machine listening. As the first outcome of this collaboration, we recently launched a competition in Kaggle  (see Freesound General-Purpose Audio Tagging Challenge), in which participants are challenged to build artificial intelligence algorithms able to recognize 41 diverse categories of everyday sounds. The dataset used for this competition is a small subset of FSD.

The great great great thing is that the outcomes of all these research efforts will help us improve Freesound in many ways. By training our search engine with FSD, we would, for example, be able to find search results inside sounds (for example, a fragment of a field recording with bird chirps), or be able to allow you to browse Freesound sounds using a hierarchical structure. This, and many other things that we will find out in the future 🙂

That’s it for now, thanks for reading…

the Freesound Team

Dear Freesounders,

Here is our monthly list of things happening in the Freesound dev world. Again, most of the deployed things are rather small improvements:

• Updates in the moderation interface and in the “sounds pending moderation” page.
• Disallow use of symbol @ in new usernames.
• In the browse by geotags page tag filters are now case-insensitive (e.g. https://freesound.org/browse/geotags/Ship/ shows the same as https://freesound.org/browse/geotags/ship/).
• Treat email addresses as case-insensitive.
• Improvements in the API documentation.
• Internal improvements (quite important!) in the way we store downloads information.
• Other minor bugfixes and optimizations.

Let’s see if by next month we can release one of the big new features that we are developing in parallel to all of the smaller changes and the development of the new frontend 😉 This one coming will hopefully make uploaders very happy! Stay tuned for the next post…

The Freesound Team

Dear all,

Welcome to our monthly update about things happening in the Freesound dev world! We have no significant new user-facing features to showcase this month but, as usual, we’ve been working in the background and been making some backend changes and developing some stuff which is not yet ready to be launched (but will be shortly!). We also continue to advance (maybe a bit slowly than expected) in the implementation of the new font-end interface 🙂 Here is the list of updates/fixes for this month:

• Store the sounds that are downloaded every time a pack is downloaded. This will allow us to tell you which sounds (and with which licenses) were inside a pack when you downloaded it.
• Change the way we store the count of downloads that you make.
• New anti-spam measures to prevent spammers from using “about” and “URL” profile fields for spamming.
• Currently we show a warning when including images from non-HTTPS locations in sound descriptions. Now this warning is extended to other fields that also support including images.
• Improvements in the API documentation.
• Other minor bugfixes and optimizations.

Aaaaand that’s for February. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post!

The Freesound Team

Dear Freesounders,

Welcome back to our monthly community update post in which we tell you about the things that have been happening in the Freesound dev world. This month we are releasing a major new feature and, as usual, many smaller things which improve Freesound here and there and make necessary steps for future improvements and new features. Our big new feature this month is…

• Username change: from time to time we receive requests from users that want to change their usernames. Until now this was not available as an option and we only did it manually after support requests. From now on, you’ll be able to change your username from your settings page. Even if you change your username, posted links to your sounds, packs, etc., will still work (we redirect to the new username). Nevertheless, please don’t go and start changing all your usernames now, 99% of your usernames are certainly really good!  This is only intended for special occasions. Also, note that you can only change your username a number of times and that, when changed, you won’t be able to go back to your previous one.

Besides this new features, here is a list of other updates and fixes:

• Store all the times you download the same sound as different records. In this way, in the future we’ll be able to tell you in which dates you downloaded a specific sound and with which license.
• Improvements in our admin interface to manage API applications.
• Updates in the documentation of the API.
• Improved processing of HTML content in forum posts, sound/pack descriptions, about field and forum/sound signature fields.
• Add a link to the sound moderation ticket from the sound page (only if you are the author of the sound or a moderator).
• Other minor bugfixes and optimizations.

Aaaaand that’s for January. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post! Some new big things are coming for uploaders 🙂

The Freesound Team

Dear all,

Just like we did one year ago, we have collected some statistics of Freesound usage during 2017 and we’d like to share them with you. The stats will be presented following the same structure as in last year’s post so let’s get started with the number of new sounds uploaded during 2017:

36,517 new sounds!

which corresponds to…

661 hours of audio!

This means that this year there have been around 1,000 more new sounds uploaded than in 2016. Interestingly, sounds uploaded in 2017 are 5 seconds longer in average than sounds uploaded in 2016, thus the increase in hours of audio with respect to 2016 (73 hours) is bigger than expected.

This year the vast majority of uploaded sounds were released under the Creative Commons 0 license, as opposed to last year where the Creative Commons 0 and Creative Commons Attribution licenses were equally distributed:

Freesound currently hosts more than 363k sounds, which means that it would take you a full 213 (and a half) days to listen to all of Freesound 😉 We still have not reached the mark of 400k sounds, but if you continue uploading sounds at the same rate it’s just a matter of months until we get there…

If we look at the tagcloud (see below) of the uploaded sounds we’ll see that, again, field-recording is the most used tag of 2017. However we see also other tags which are very common: vsco-2, multisample and single-note among others. This is because of the addition of the Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra 2 Community Edition library of ~3,000 instrument samples that happened back in January 2017.

And now getting to the ranking of uploaders. Last year there was a bit of controversy because we showed a raking of users sorted by the number of uploaded sounds during 2016, but this did not take into account the duration of the sounds. So this year we are showing two rankings, one ordered by number of uploads and the other ordered by total uploaded time:

As you can see, the number of uploaded sounds and the total number of uploaded hours are different beasts, but there are some users who made it into both rankings. Congratulations to all uploaders (and moderators!) regardless of whether you are or not in the ranking!

Let’s now continue with statistics about the number of downloads. The number of sound downloads (including packs) during 2017 was…

16,600,000 downloads!

So yes, you’ve beaten last year’s record of downloads. In fact, Freesounders have made more than 110M downloads in all its history, which means an average of 300 downloads per sound. Quite a number! Nevertheless, if we look closely at the downloads data, we see that there are a few sounds which are downloaded A LOT, and MANY sounds which are not downloaded much. In statistics, this is called a long tail distribution, and it’s something very common. Here we show a histogram of the number of downloads per sound:

This histogram should be read like “40% of the sounds in Freesound have been downloaded between 0 and 20 times”, “10% have been downloaded between 20 and 40 times”, and so on. In this histogram we only show up to 500 downloads per sound, but to make it complete we should show until ~130,000 downloads per sound (which is the number of downloads of the most downloaded sound in Freesound). The global average is at 300 downloads/sound, but the the likelihood of getting 300 or more downloads after uploading a sound in Freesound is not as high as you would expect (only one out of six sounds get, at least, that many downloads!). However don’t worry too much, 96% of sounds get at least one download 😉 In any case, you know what you have to do: upload awesome sounds! But before downloads happen, people need to search for stuff, so let’s see what Freesound users are searching for:

Does this look familiar? It looks quite similar to the termcloud we showed one year ago doesn’t it? Well, apparently wind, explosion, music and whoosh (in all it’s spelling variants) are still the most commonly used search terms. For example, on average for every day, there are more than 400 queries with the term wind and more than 270 queries with the term explosion. Other terms in the termcloud like scream or footsteps also seem to be pretty stable from one year to the next. We’ll see what happens in 2018!

To finalize this post, some numbers about messages, ratings, forums and comments. During 2017, you’ve sent more than 19k messages, added 140k sound ratings, written 1,900 forum posts and made more than 43k sound comments! With the exception of sound ratings (which has increased), these numbers are slightly lower than last year’s stats. We’ll see what happens next year after the new interface has been released and the impact that it will have on all these numbers.

Thanks for reading and enjoy a 2018 full of sounds!

The Freesound Team

Dear Freesounders,

Here we are again with our monthly community update about things that have been happening in the Freesound dev world.

This month we have not released new user-facing  features, but this does not mean we have not been working hard 🙂 We indeed made a lot of changes on things that are not so much visible, and we are also in the middle of implementing other new features that you will love but are not ready yet to be deployed. So here comes the list of things we did:

• Make links to sounds whose author changed his username still work after the username change
• Prevent some errors that could happen when users double-click submit buttons in forms
• Improvements in the way the number of sounds per users and packs, the number of posts per users, and number of comments and ratings per sounds are stored and synchronized with the real counts
• Minor improvements in moderation workflow
• Deleting your user account now requires to re-enter your password
• Fix bug that in some occasions showed wrong sound signatures
• Speed optimizations in our admin pages
• Improve the way in which we store and synchronize information about user donations
• Other minor bugfixes and optimizations

This is quite a number of things… but we have more news! Just as a kind of Christmas present, we would like to annoucne that during the last months we have been working hard with a designer on a complete redesign of the Freesound look and feel. This means that at some point in the next year Freesound will get a renewed design, more modern and easier to use. As part of the design, we slightly updated the Freesound logo and this, ladies and gentleman, will be the new logo and “red” Freesound tone:

Looks great, doesn’t it? The design phase for the new look and feel has already finished, and we have just started the actual implementation phase. During the design phase, the goal has always been to update Freesound’s look while preserving existing functionalities and workflows. It is still too early to reliably estimate a release date, but we’ll keep you posted.  Exciting, isn’t it?

Aaaand that’s it for now, thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post!

The Freesound Team

ps: don’t see the differences in the logo? put it next to the current one 😉

Hi again,

This is our monthly update of things happening in Freesound development! Remember we told you we’d try to write regularly-spaced-in-time blog posts letting you know what’s going on? Well we made it, so once month later here is a new issue 🙂

Here are the new features deployed this month:

• Sound signature. If you go to your settings page you’ll see a new form field with the title Sound signature which allows you to introduce some text. You guessed it right? This text will be added at the end of the description of all of your sounds. If you change the sound signature, it will automatically be updated on all of your sounds. This way you’ll be able to add attribution instructions or other information that you want to appear in each sound. What? You have uploaded no sounds? Maybe it’s time to start!
• Subscribe/Unsusbscribe to forum threads at any time. Those of you who participate in the forums already know that when you post in a thread you have the option to subscribe to the thread and get email notifications when new messages are posted. In these email notifications you have the option to unsusbscribe from the thread as well. Now these two operations can be easily performed from the thread page. This also means that you can receive notifications without actually participating in the conversation.

Besides these new features, we also made some other smaller changes and bugfixes:

• Added minor improvements in the UI of the describe sounds page.
• Fixed a bug which was wrongly reading metadata of some file formats including lossless version of M4a files.
• Fixed a bug which disabled the group by pack option in search page.
• Fixed a bug that caused some pack filters to fail in the search page when pack names contained non alphanumeric characters.
• Fixed a bug in the search page which prevented sorting options other than Automatic by relevance to be used.
• Correction of other smaller errors, significant code clean ups and internal optimizations.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post!

The Freesound Team

Dear Freesounders,

We’ve been working hard on Freesound lately and have some news to share with you. You’ll remember that earlier this year we started a campaign to promote donations in Freesound. We had a public discussion in the forums where many of you participated (thanks!), and we finally started the donations campaign in July 2017 (see this forum post for details on the campaign). We’re now getting 15 times more donations than we used to get before starting the campaign which is a great start! It moves us closer to our sustainability goal and it has already allowed us to start spending more time and resources on improving Freesound for all of our users. Thank you all!

We have recently released some new user-visible features to Fresound:

• Donations via stripe. Some potential donors didn’t want to use Paypal to send donations to us.  As an alternative, we added support for donations by credit card using Stripe.
• Support for AAC files (.m4a extension). You can now upload sounds encoded using Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). AAC is a lossy audio compression standard designed to be the successor of MP3. Even though we still prefer sounds to be upload using uncompressed formats or non-proprietary formats like OGG, we’re sure that AAC support will come in handy for many Freesound users. [EDIT 20/10/2017: user guyburns reported that lossless m4a files are also supported but that there seem to be problems detecting the number of channels].
• Faster random sound navigation. We’ve always had the ability to randomly browse for a random sound in Freesound. Now this is faster, try it today!
• Sound license history. We now keep track if a sound uploader changes the license of their sound. This is important because you may have downloaded a sound under one license, and when you go back to check its status some months later the license may have changed! We will now tell you what the license was when you downloaded the sound so that you can be sure of your rights and obligations.

We’ve also made a number of smaller changes which are not as visible, but help us improve Freesound for us and you:

• We now keep a record of what the sound of the day was each day. Do you want a throwback to what the sound of the day was on a particular day of the year? We’ll be able to tell you!
• If you forget your password and your email address you can now reset it using just your username, much the same way that you can log in with both your username and email.
• If you’re uploading many sounds at once with a geolocation, we now remember the last location that you added so that you can quickly add the next.
• Tickets now show faster for our tireless team of moderators (thanks everyone!)
• We’re making changes to move Freesound to a full HTTPS setup, protecting you when you enter passwords when logging in.
• We’re fixing small programming errors that have accumulated over years of Freesound development. If you’ve ever got a message saying “You found some part of Freesound that’s broken”, then don’t worry, we get a notification of the error and we’re working to make sure that these errors happen less for our users.

That’s all for now! Hopefully this will be the first post of a series of more-or-less-regularly-spaced-in-time posts that we’ll be doing to keep you updated about things happening in the Freesound dev world. Want some more exciting news? Then wait for the next post 🙂

Thanks for reading and keep on Freesounding!

The Freesound Team

Dear Freesounders,

On Monday 3rd at 10:30 a.m. CEST Freesound will be down for approximately two hours while we perform some maintenance on our servers. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

Cheers,

edit: all servers have been updated and we’re back to normality (Monday 3rd 1 p.m.)