The Freesound Blog

As you may have read in previous posts, email has been quite a nightmare for us during the last few weeks. The problem was triggered by successive changes in the limits of the service we were using, of which we had no prior notice. In addition, the university campus where Freesound runs is closed at this particular time in the year, which further limited our ability to react.

We have now started using a specialized service for email, which is working very well. This may not be the final solution, but it will certainly allow us to transition smoothly in any case. We can now tell for sure that our problems are gone, and emails are sent normally. Once more some emails have been lost in the process. If you didn’t receive your activation email, click on resend activation code on the registration page.

So that was it. Enjoy the summer, and happy freesounding!

The Freesound Team

In the frame of the Campus Gutenberg event, organized by the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), there is an open call for recording sounds related to science and upload them to Freesound.

How do you think science may sound? chemistry, mathematics, biology?

The challenge is to collect as much sounds as possible in order to be played in public on September 18^th ,2012 during the Campus Gutenberg event.

To participate just have to record a sound that represents any scientific discipline and use the following tags:

Tag 1: Campus-Gutenberg

Tag 2: choose one of the following:

Bioscience
Medical-science
Environmental-science
Physics-chemistry-mathematics
Engineering

Tag 3: a tag that describe your sound

The deadline for uploading sound is August 26^th

Campus Gutenberg is an open and free activity that will take place on the 17 and 18 of September at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Find all the information: http://www.occ.upf.edu/gutenberg/?page_id=315

During the days our server was banned, we accumulated a large pile of unsent email. Yet, in order to avoid being banned again, we have to send these at a very slow rate. Unfortunately during this process some emails have been marked as undeliverable and lost forever. For those who asked: delays in moderation have nothing to do with email. Also we have NOT sent any email with “null” sender address or anything like that.

We hope that the queue will be cleared in a few days. If you registered and you don’t receive the activation email in 3 or 4 days, you can click “Resend activation code” in the registration page (but please, not yet!).

UPDATE:
The queue is now cleared, email should be working fine. Back to normal!

UPDATE 2:
Broken again! Something changed at our provider side, working on it …

As many of you have noticed, email from Freesound is currently not working. This means that it is not possible to register, and that emails related with the forum, comments and private messages are not being sent.

The problem is that the way we like Freesound to work we have to send many emails. Sending large amounts of email is no simple thing, it may overload servers, and it may bear confusions, such as our email being reported as spam and our domain blacklisted. We use an external provider for sending email, and at the moment our server has been banned from sending more messages. We are working with them in order to clarify and resolve the situation. Hopefully we’ll be back in business soon!

Last week took place the Music Hack Day in the context of the S?nar Festival in Barcelona. The Freesound team was present and showing some new functionalities we have been implementing for our API (check the developers page if you want to learn more about that!). It was a big success, and a lot of hackers used the Freesound API to create amazing new applications! Furthermore, the Freesound Team won nothing less that four awards (given by The Echonest,?Reactable Systems?and?Zvooq) for our hacks!

You can read more about all the hacks done in the Music Hack Day wiki. Here it goes a summary of those hacks related to Freesound:

• MusicGene (http://zvooq.ru/musicgene/): automatic music generator using Freesound samples.
• Free(CC)it! (http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Free(CC)it!): automatic creation of license-free covers of commercial tunes using Freesound samples.
• Soundscape Turntablism (http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Soundscape_Turntablism): DJing with Freesound samples using a homemade turntable and some Reactivision fiducials!
• FreestyleSound (http://www.tamats.com/blog/?p=261): amazing iPad interface to play around and perform with Freesound samples!
• HackRap (http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=HackRap): live performance using a lot of APIs and including Freesound samples.

We are very happy to announce that the project Sons de Barcelona (Sounds of Barcelona) has been selected as one of the winners of the ?EngageU awards?, a European competition looking for best innovations in university outreach and public engagement, for which we asked for your votes some weeks ago. http://blog.freesound.org/?p=229 So, thanks for sopporting the project!

Sons de Barcelona is an educational initiative around Freesound, running workshops in schools to foster interest in music technologies among the students community by using the Freesound ideas and technologies.

The award will help to keep improving the current activity of Sons de Barcelona and to start working on a new project dedicated to the sounds of multicultural communities within Barcelona.

More information about the awards: http://engageawards.com/results

Hello everyone,

as most of you will know Freesound is a site that was started six years ago in the context of the?Music Technology Group?of the?Universitat Pompeu Fabra. One of the aims of the project was to create an open database of sounds that could also be used for scientific research. Freesound is being maintained by current and former members of the Music Technology Group – the?Freesound team?- and we are continuously researching about Freesound to learn about sounds and online communities, and to be able to use our scientific outcome to improve the site. For this reason,?we are now conducting a very small survey?to better understand your motivations using Freesound and at the end the nature of Freesound itself.

Please, go to the this forum thread and participate in the survey! You’ll find the instructions there.

Thank you very much in advance for your participation, we really appreciate your feedback…

We’re looking forward to read all your answers that will help us in our research and in the improvement of Freesound!

frederic