Freesound donation withdrawal blocked by paypal…

When you read a post about paypal freezing 600,000??for the MineCraft developer?on his blog?you think, “oooh bad luck”! And then it happens to freesound too. We have about 4000??in our paypal account and now paypal doesn’t believe we are a non-profit organisation. This means that people can keep adding money to the account, but we can’t withdraw. The first fax (fax!! how retro…) we sent to them got processed, but when we got even more questions and answered by fax again no reply came. We tried again, no luck. This is rather annoying… We will try again via the “resolution center” at paypal (which is slow and buggy) but…Update: everything was resolved and we got our money – it took a long time, but …!

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Umbrella Adventure

David Smithson from Hive writes to tell me about the usage of freesound sounds in Umbrella Adventure

Umbrella Adventure is an entirely hand-drawn exploration adventure game, which takes place in a huge forest full of platforming challenges, enemies and puzzles. The main character, Gopher, wakes up to find his collection of cakes stolen in the night, and it’s up to you to arm yourself with an umbrella and head out into the world to bring them all back, by using the umbrella to overcome the obstacles in your way, meeting new friends, and opening new doorways and paths through the forest.

One of the game’s biggest focal points is immersion – creating the feeling that the world you’re exploring is solid, consistent and real, and this, from our side, involves making sure the entire world feels right, moves right, and sounds right. For a game like this to work, we needed a huge range of different sounds which could be combined to create a rich, realistic soundscape for players to explore through. In the three or four years since the development of the game began, we’ve used a ton of material from Freesound contributors, mostly ambient, nature and weather effects, although there are some bizarre sounds in there too; it’s pretty neat to think that, for example, the sound of someone scratching their beard has contributed to our work like that. A lot of care was taken to make sure everything in the game, from the player character to moving enemies and scenery, sounds the way it should, so players can really get inside the game and believe what they’re hearing, and in this respect Freesound has been absolutely essential to us. Visiting and being part of Freesound is something really integral to the ‘indie spirit’ of game development for us; the community there is really dedicated to promoting the creative output of all its members, and it’s great to see so many people united by their common love of finding and making great sounds. It’s something we’re all really thankful is still there, and very proud to be working with.

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Digit?pia Competitions 2010

The guys at Casa da M?sica in Portugal are running a competition which involves Freesound.org and yours truly as a judge. Have a look! Enter! Win a midi controller!!

The first Digit?pia Miniatures Competition took place in 2008. The aim of this competition was to create a musical miniature of up to 90 seconds, using the resources available at Digit?pia. Entrants had to use at least one sound from those recorded on the Porto Underground by Factor E, Casa da M?sica?s resident team in the Education Department, on World Music Day in 2008. Aimed at stimulating the continual use of Digit?pia?s resources and encouraging greater musical ambition, this competition attracted many and varied entries, and the winner Jo?o Gravato, received a Midi controller and 20 tickets for events of his choice held at Casa da M?sica during 2009.

The next three competitions ? all of them international, which is also reflected in the panels comprising major figures from the field ? are physically separate from Digit?pia, although the facility possesses all the resources need to produce an entry. Nevertheless, they possibly come even closer to the philosophy of the project. The differences can immediately be seen in the prizes on offer: instead of a commercially-available Midi controller, we are developing a special one-off Midi controller, with the unmistakable Digit?pia stamp. But more importantly, all the competitions reflect the idea of sharing with the community: from original Max/MSP or Pure Data patches distributed with open source licences, to new contributions of small musical gestures to freesound.org. It all culminates in a special competition which is full of potential: we will reward the most daring dream by making it come true!”

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Zorg and Andy

Guy Davis, creator of the indie movie?Zorg and Andy?writes to tell us about his usage of sounds from Freesound. Not only that, but he offers us a nice reduction price for people who want to buy the dvd! Read on for details!

“While in post-production on our film, “Zorg and Andy,” I knew I wanted to try not to skimp on audio finishing (we’d skimped on so many other things, it seemed only natural to try to do something right).

Unfortunately, we were completely out of money (tragically, we still are) and so we had to find some creative (and free!) ways to try to do the necessary audio work. ?We obviously couldn’t afford any of the commercial sound effects libraries to supplement our Apple Loops collection, but the problem disappeared after I stumbled across Freesound.

I used Freesound samples in a myriad of ways: ?everything from ambience and effects, to transitional pieces and Foley (and if I never have to lay in another pair of footsteps by hand, it will be too soon).

I was absolutely amazed at not only the breadth of the samples available on the site, but also by the ease of searching. ?For instance, in one particular scene I needed to find the sound of malevolent chanting (our movie is a goofy comedy concerning a number of cults on a college campus who are all fighting for possession of a mysterious, ancient idol)–on Freesound, no problem! One quick search and I found a ready-to-wear evil incantation.

For me, one of the most satisfying things about sound effects work is creating the illusion of reality by combining seemingly disparate elements, from using the sounds of an Uzi and a gas stove being lit to help sell a camera flash, to using the sounds of insects, birds flapping their wings, a dragon’s hiss (!) and a bean belt shaker to create a roomful of ravenous, flesh-eating beetles. I was able to find virtually everything I needed here.

Again, I can’t begin to thank you enough, Bram, for creating Freesound, and I’d also like to thank all of your members for contributing to this wonderful resource.

And if any of your members are fans of cheesy, b-movies, “Zorg” is available on DVD and digital download through Film Baby. And for all of your help, we’d like to offer the cast and crew discount of 25% off DVD’s and 20% off downloads. ?At checkout, just use the discount code: freesound”

credits 1credits 2

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Final logo for freesound 2

With the help of pixelshell and oneDotOnly, we finalized the freesound 2 / nightingale logo yesterday:

For other versions of the logo, check these urls:

The PNG version were made by me and still need tweaking to get the best result. The designers will make new PNG versions especially for web-use.

Posted in design, Nightingale | 5 Comments

Follow Freesound 2 development on twitter

Hello all,

you can now follow freesound 2 development on twitter, just follow the user freesounddev: http://twitter.com/freesounddev/

If you’re not a developer you might not understand everything, as there are so called “commit messages”, but you might see things flying past you recognize 😉

– Bram

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Freesound iphone/ipod touch application!

Hello all,

Eric from nibblesoft wrote me a while back that he was working on a freesound application for the iphone / ipod touch. We’re quite happy with the pplication, it’s fun to see the first custom application on a handheld device! Have a look at the page on nibblesoft’s website, or alternatively, go directly to the itunes store. The application isn’t free, but Eric has promised us that he will donate part of the income to Freesound, which makes us very happy!

Some information about the app… Features Include:

  • Search freesound.org and listen to sounds.
  • Request any freesound.org sound to be emailed to you as a ringtone.
  • Record your own sounds and submit recordings to freesound.org over WiFi.
  • “Loop” sounds during playback.
  • Rate a sound.
  • Email a link to a sound.
  • Over 150 sounds come “pre-marked” as favorites.
  • Search your favorites list or recordings list.

Here are some screenshots:

Posted in Tech Talk | 7 Comments

SMC Summer School 2009 – Porto, Portugal, July 18-21

Hello everyone.

I will be one of the tutors in the Sound and Music Computing (SCM) Summer School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds. It will take place at the Casa da M?sica, Porto, Portugal, from July 18 to 21, 2009. The topic of this summer school is audio/field recording and processing/analysis of those sounds.

The main teachers will be Joel Chadabe (Electronic Music Foundation), Marcelo Wanderley (McGill University, Montreal) and Xavier Serra (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain). Other tutors include Jean-Julien Acouturier, Stephan Baumann, Eoin Brazil, Federico Fontana, Luis Gustavo Martins, Rui Penha and Stefania Serafin.

Students can register to participate to the upcoming SMC Summer School by making an application. Summer school student grants will be provided by the COST Action IC0601 on Sonic Interaction Design.

Application deadline: 24th April.

More info: http://smcnetwork.org/summerschool/porto2009

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Barcelona Sound projects

Ariadna from Sons de barcelona (Sounds of Barcelona) let me know that their “Barcelona Sound Project” got its deadline extended until the 27th of April!

“The Music Technology Group (MTG) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona started in 2008 the project Sons de Barcelona (Sounds of Barcelona) in order to offer to everybody a database of sounds of this city created in a collaborative way, with the contribution of the citizens themselves and integrated into the international project freesound.org, also from MTG. The sounds are recordings of acoustic environments of Barcelona or different sounds generated in very different ways by the users, and published under Creative Commons License (so they can be freely re-used again). The Sounds of Barcelona team conducts workshops addressed to different collectives in order to propagate the use of audio technologies, to teach how to take advantage of all their possibilities, and to awake an interest towards working with sounds.

The aim of this call is to activate, to promote, and to support works related to the sound sphere of the city of Barcelona and it is addressed to everybody interested in make their projects known. “

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Final nightingale sound flash player!

Have a look at the final and all new nightingale sound player:

http://media.freesound.org/files/newplayer/

This is the player that will be displayed in the “single sample view” page. You will need flash 10 to see it: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

Please let me know your opinions, and if you find any bugs… I’d like to hear about those as well.

For those of you interested in seeing the source code (GPL license!), you can do that right here:
http://github.com/bram/freesound/tree/bae1763d1abe9b4d09ed994ba413d68c4fac5412/sandbox/flash10player

Posted in Nightingale | 4 Comments