The Freesound Blog

Dear Freesounders,

It’s been a while since our last post, but as always we’ve been busy working on many Freesoundish things. This time, we’d like to let you know about the new?Audio Commons initiative!

During the last year we’ve been working together with two other research institutions (Queen Mary University of London and University of Surrey) and three?companies (Jamendo, Audiogaming and Waves), to prepare a project proposal for one of the funding lines of?the European Commission (Horizon 2020 programme). The project we proposed is to support that?Audio Commons initiative, and the good news is that we have been granted the funding! This means that we will start now working in this project together with the aforementioned research institutions and companies and with the aim of attracting more people in our way.

But, “what is Audio Commons all about and why are you explaining all of this to us”? Well, the objective of the Audio Commons initiative is to promote and facilitate the reuse of Creative Commons audio content in production environments. This includes the development of new technologies for annotating and organising sound samples and music pieces, the development of technologies to?support easy?licensing procedures?of CC audio content, and the development of tools to allow easy access to CC audio content within existing production environments?such as a DAWs or video editors.?Freesound is playing a big role in this initiative?as, together with?Jamendo, we will be the first repository of CC audio content to be part of the initiative. You’ll find more detailed information in the Audio Commons web site: www.audiocommons.org.

We’re very excited to?start this new initiative and to work on all the challenges that it poses. We sincerely think that the Audio Commons initiative and Freesound can be greatly?beneficial to each other, and expect that the?outcomes of this symbiosis will also be very valuable?and useful to the whole Freesound community. That’s all for now, we’ll keep you informed!

cheers,

frederic

Dear freesounders,

we are happy to announce that we’ve just launched?a new Freesound-side site called Freesound Labs.?Freesound Labs is a directory of projects, hacks, apps, research and other initiatives that use content from Freesound or use the Freesound API. Our aim is to keep on updating this directory as we come across more and more Freesound powered projects. If you know of projects that should be listed in this?directory and are not there, please let us know 😉

We hope that you enjoy navigating Freesound Labs?and getting to know what amazing things people are doing with?content from Freesound. In?the end, all this is possible thanks?to all of your contributed sounds, so you can feel proud of it 🙂

cheers,

frederic

Hi everyone,

We’re glad to announce that we’re in the process of uploading around 70GB of analog synthesizer samples to Freesound*, aka the Modular Samples library, consisting of 40,000 samples organised?in 461 packs, recorded from 20 different analog synthesizers and released with the CC0 license !

All sounds are tagged with instrument names, note names, midi note numbers?and, when available, different velocity layers. Check them out at?http://www.freesound.org/people/modularsamples/

All this has been possible thanks to the incredible efforts of?Richard Taylor, who has been creating this library for?many years and has now kindly offered it to us to upload to Freesound. Make sure to check the Modular Samples library’s?official page, facebook?and?soundcloud?profiles. Thanks Richard!

Enjoy!!!

frederic

*?At the time of this writing we have only uploaded around 10% of the whole library, you can expect the?upload process to continue?during the following days…

UPDATE 10/7/2015: The?Modular Samples?library?has been now completely uploaded!

Hi everyone,

as some of you might have noticed, we’re having problems processing sounds. Don’t worry about your sounds, they’re safe and you can continue uploading, but they won’t be processed (and moderated) until the problems are fixed.

Thank you for your understanding, we’ll let you know when processing is up and running again!

[edit: problem has been fixed and sounds are being reprocessed]

frederic

Dear Freesounders,

You maybe didn’t know this yet, but Freesound has just turned 10 this month! The project started out as an all-red website?back in the days. It was built on rather shabby technology and has by now grown way beyond its initial goals. Way back in 2005 I took?Xavier Serra‘s idea of “having a website where composers can exchange sounds” for ICMC 2005. I hacked together?something rather rudimentary?and?invited some of my friends over. We started adding a few sounds and very quickly Freesound unexpectedly exploded into a massive sprawling community.

Freesound was rewritten from scratch to support the high demand and by now I’m no longer involved in Freesound on a fulltime basis:?other amazingly capable people at the Music Technology Group have taken over while I moved a bit more to the background. I still keep an honorary position in Freesound as the?”Self-Proclaimed Benevolent Dictator for Life” which is probably why I’m writing this happy post…! 😉

So, what about the next 10 year? Well, many plans are brewing!!?As you might know, a lot of research is being carried out in the Music Technology Group, including plenty of research related to?Freesound. Work is being done to?improve the way in which sounds are stored, analysed and described. Improvements in searching and browsing would be a first result from this work. Improvements in?uploading and describing sounds a second. The Freesound Team is also?starting collaborations with third parties and preparing really exciting new research and development projects that will support Freesound in the coming years.?Stay tuned, future looks promising!

So, what about some fun nerdy statistics?

• 240?000?sounds, uploaded by 13 000 people. If all sounds were played after one another, Freesound would by now play for 146 days straight!
• More than 4 million?people have signed up to?download?sounds more than 65?million times.
• More than 50 000 people visit us each day.

In order to celebrate this joyous day, one of our moderators who you all know as?AlienXXX?has created a new “Freesound Dare” that matches the 10 year anniversary?theme! We dare you to join it!

Best Greetings,

Bram -?in the name of the Freesound Team

PS:?have you freed your sound today??!

Dear Freesounders,

It is christmas time (again), and the freesound team has prepared a present for you…
We have been working on a new functionality* which has just been deployed, and that will allow you to follow?freesound users and get notifications when these users upload new sounds! But not only that, you’ll also be able to follow groups of tags, and be notified when new sounds are uploaded that have these tags. It all works in the following way:

• When visiting a user profile, you’ll find a “Follow” button right under the user avatar. Click on this button to start following that user.
• When browsing sounds?by?tags, you’ll find a “Follow tags” button under the group?of tags that you selected for?browsing. By clicking this button, you’ll start following sounds tagged?with?all of these tags.
• In your settings page, you can tick the new checkbox that says “Receive weekly stream update email notifications” to turn on notifications for new sounds uploaded by the users you follow or?with the tags you follow. We will only send you one email per week, with a summary of all updates, and we are only going to send that email if there are updates.
• Once you start following users and tags, you can use your new activity stream page?to show all updates from users and tags you follow. By default this page shows updates for the last week (just like the email notification), but you can also specify other periods of time and, for example, list sounds uploaded by the users you follow that were uploaded during the last month. You’ll find a link to the activity stream in your home page.

Hmmm.. that is all! We hope you enjoy this new functionality and, as always, please tell us if you find things that are not working as expected!

keep on Freesounding!

* thanks to nunoh who joined the team for a while and did most of the implementation of this?functionality

CCMixter, one of the first open platforms for Creative Commons music sharing out there is in trouble. The site was started by Creative Commons themselves many years ago, but understandably “let go” because Creative Commons is a legal organisation, not a music publishing one!?Now CCMixter needs your help.

About 5 years ago the main creator and developer -good friend of freesound.org!- had to move on to other things in life and the site was taking over by new management. Not wanting to turn the site into a commercial venture, CCMixter was kept on life support for as long as possible. A heap?of volunteers are?keeping the site up, but lately it is becoming too much work for the volunteers to keep up?with the work. This is mostly due to some much needed development work.

CCMixter is now doing an indiegogo campaign to raise some funds for better hosting and development work – we thought you might want to know about this…

Hello Freesounders

Sometimes I promote the Freesound Dares (our friendly competitions) here on the main page. But sometimes I forget…
So, I am trying to make up for it, because this dare is definitely worth promoting.

This time the dare is not about samples at all. It is about recognizing, helping and encouraging free-software developers.
In particular, the developer of an android app called UFXLoops. – Don’t let the name fool you. This app is actually a DAW powerfull enough to allow you to build a complete music piece.
Interested?
Full details of the dare are here:
http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/35496/?page=1#post77006

Now, if you have only seen this now and you did not know about the dare, I have extended the deadline to 30 Nov 2014. So you still have time to participate!