The Freesound Blog

Dear Freesounders,

some of you will already know that as part of our research towards improving Freesound, we’ve been working on a tag recommendation system for Freesound. The goal of this system is to make it easier for you to tag your sounds and at the same time to try to get more comprehensive?sound descriptions. The better the sounds are described, the better?Freesound will be 🙂

One year ago we opened an online experiment to evaluate the tag recommendation system that is currently implemented in Freesound. Your participation and feedback was very helpful, and since then we’ve been working on a new version which includes some radical changes that we think will be very useful. For that reason, we are opening now a new online experiment in which we want to compare the new system with the one currently implemented in Freesound.

The new?experiment is called?Freesound tagging experiment 2, and in it you’ll have to annotate a total of 15 sounds. In the experiment,?not all of the participants will be using the new interface?to annotate these sounds, so don’t be surprised if you only see the typical tag recommendation interface.?After the experiment is finished, we will deploy a beta-testing version of the new interface so those who could not try it this time, will be able to do it later.

We kindly ask you to participate in the new experiment?that we have set up at?http://labs.freesound.org/tagrecommendation/. Please carefully read the instructions and follow all steps until the experiment is finished. It will take around 20 minutes.

So that is all for the moment,?thank you very very very much?in advance for your participation. ?I hope you find the experiment interesting!

keep on Freesounding!

ps: you can leave comments and suggestions?here

EDIT: Thank ?you all for participating! The experiment has been closed now with almost 200 participants! We really appreciate your effort 🙂

Hello everyone,

we’re happy to announce that today we are officially releasing a new api?for Freesound, APIv2!

The new api?enables developers to make better applications that make use of Freesound content. APIv2 brings many improvements over the previous version such as the possibility to upload sounds or to define queries combining sound metadata and audio descriptors. For more information on whats new, you can check the api documentation here.

Let’s see what developers do with the new api!!!

keep on Freesounding!

Recently (about a month ago) we have added https to our web server. This was a requirement for the new v2 API, but it also allows us to browse the page securely. You can tell if you are using https by checking the icon at the left of the address bar.

Unfortunately there have been some issues with the transition that took us some time to catch. One possible reason is that it took some time for google to start directing people to the https version of the site.

– Registration. The captcha was not appearing when using https. Thus you could never prove you are a human even if you are. Should be fixed now.

– Uploading. Uploading sounds larger than 1MB failed as well on https. Fixed too!

With respect to 503 and 504 errors mentioned in the previous post, we are still working on it, but it’s looking good. We hope to restore the packs browsing page next week.
more information

Happy freesounding!

Hi. As you are probably noticing, the site is working intermittently at the moment, with 503 and 504 errors appearing often. We haven’t been able to find the source yet. We’ll update this post as we get a clearer idea by tomorrow morning (CET). Hopefully it should improve in the mean time as traffic slows down ? bear with us!

UPDATE 1: There seems to be a problem with a recent upgrade of the search server. Things seem to work normally again after a restart, but it could still come back?

UPDATE 2: After reconfiguring the search server the worst part seems to be passed. We are still looking at some connection problems. Pages may still take a bit to load some times, but most of the time the site seems to run fine.

UPDATE 3: In the end the most serious problems were not related to the search server, but to some of our database queries. We are still working on that, but in the mean time you may have noticed we have disabled the link to the page for browsing packs. That helped us to put the situation under control. It will be back very soon.

UPDATE 4: The “browse packs” page is back online and optimized so that it does not create problems again.

Hi there!

we added a small new feature to facilitate the way in which you add and remove sounds from your packs. Say welcome to the “Edit Pack” page!

Just like when editing sounds information, you can now click on the “edit pack information” link that you’ll find in your pack pages and use the new interface to edit name, description and add/remove sounds from the pack.

keep on Freesounding!

Hi dear Freesounders!

today we’ve added a small new feature that should help those of you uploading sounds. We added a new page called “Uploaded?sounds awaiting moderation” to make it easier to keep track of the moderation status of your newly uploaded sounds. Once your sounds are uploaded, described and processed, you’ll see an indicator in the header of Freesound named ‘uploads’, with the number of sounds you have in moderation stage. This indicator is not visible when you have no sounds in moderation stage, or when your newly uploaded sounds have not been processed yet. By clicking at this indicator you’ll be directed to a page with the list of your sounds pending moderation and with links to the moderation ticket, to the edit page for the sound, and with a shinny warning indicating when a moderator added a comment regarding your sound and is awaiting your response.

Hope you find this useful!

keep on Freesounding!

Hello everyone,

last two days we’ve been experiencing some problems that caused uploaded sounds to fail processing. The problems are now fixed and we are reprocessing all these files. This means that our beloved and always hard working moderators have now a sudden long queue of sounds pending moderation. Please be patient 😉

We will be soon back to normality. Sorry for the delay and thank you for your understanding!

Dear Freesounders,

as you might know we have been lately working on a tag recommendation system for Freesound. The system we’ve been working on will suggest potentially meaningful tags when you are describing your uploaded sounds or when you are editing the descriptions of already uploaded sounds. Suggested tags are displayed in a list and can be added to the sounds you’re describing.

The good news is that this system has finally been deployed in Freesound and it is ready to help you adding tags to your sounds! If you want to comment and give some feedback/ask questions about the system, please do it in this forum thread.

We hope that tag recommendation helps improving the?quality and coherence of sound descriptions and eases the uploading process!

Today we need to perform some maintenance on the main Freesound internet connection starting at 10 p.m. CET (1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern). You may notice that Freesound is unavailable around this time, but we will be back as soon as possible.

When you click in the “Similar sounds” button of a sound, you receive a list of sounds that are similar according to its acoustic properties. The technology that powers this feature is Essentia, a library developed during several years at the Music Technology Group of UPF, where we host and support Freesound. The descriptors computed by Essentia are also available through the Freesound API.
Essentia was recently released as an open source library, and consequently the program in Freesound that uses it is now also open source. This means that anyone can see how it works, and use this technology for open source projects (the library can also be licensed for closed source projects upon request). One interesting consequence is that you can now compute the same descriptors that Freesound uses for any sound, and, using the API, search for similar sounds from Freesound. Play a note and get sounds with the same pitch, or the same timbre, imitate sounds with your mouth… you name it, we await for your hacks!