Dear Freesounders, Freesound has run some dares (friendly challenges or competitions) around 5-6 years ago. Interestingly, posts continued to be made against the original dare threads with some entries comming years later. Obviouly, this means there was some interest from the Freesound community in this type of activity. I have personally entered similar competitions on various internet sites and I would say that for the training or hobbyst musician they are a unique opportunity to work on a specific project with constraints and deadlines imposed on you. They are an excellent way to train your skills and to get feedback and learn from others. In the specific context of Freesound I believe there is a lot to be gained from interaction between Freesounders. Freesound is not just "a database of sounds" or even one that reacts to "sample requests". Freesound is a living community of people who share an interest in sound, and within this community there are considerable amounts of both knowledge and goodwill. I hope the ‘New Generation’ Dares which I have started a couple of months ago (just after the launch of Freesound 2.0) will be interesting and inspiring enough for you to participate or to follow what is going on (and perhaps vote for your favourite). But most of all, I hope they will encourage you to interact with Freesound and other Freesounders in new and exciting ways. The latest Dare is open and waiting for your entries: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/17489/ Closes 20 December 2011.

Dear Freesounders, It’s christmas time and the Freesound team has been working hard to bring some presents in the form of new functionalities and bug fixes to celebrate the occasion. First of all we implemented a couple of new features for the forums. From now on, you’ll be able to browse latest posts of all forums in the Latest forum posts page. Moreover, at the time of replying a post you’ll see a list of the last posts in the same thread so it will be much easier to follow the conversation. Finally, we have improved our thread unread markers so they should be working better right now! The second of our christmas presents is a very long awaited feature: deletion of accounts and sounds. From now on, you can get rid of unwanted sounds by deleting them through the Edit Sound page. If you have not uploaded any sounds, you can delete your user account through the Settings Page. If you have sounds, you’ll have to ask us for deleting the account. This is to make sure we don’t accidentally lose a lot of sounds in one go! We have also implemented some functionality to store sound Bookmarks! You will notice that if you are logged in, a new small blue address book icon will appear when browsing sounds (). Clicking this icon will show a small panel to bookmark the sound. In this panel you can set a name for the bookmark and assign a custom category (similarly to what you do with web browser bookmarks). This way you’ll be able to bookmark all interesting sounds that you hear in Freesound and organize them under different categories. You’ll be able also to browse other people’s bookmark lists through their profile page too. Last but not least, we fixed some bugs and tweaked our system to improve performance. One of the most important bug fixes is related with the creation of zip files for pack downloads. Some of you reported that pack downloading was not working properly, resulting in empty or incomplete zip files. This should be solved now (although there might still be some random packs out there that need to be fixed)! A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from… The Freesound Core Developers Team (Gerard, Frederic, Stelios and Bram)

Dear Freesounders, We have recently closed dare 8. It was the first dare to hold a vote for the best entry. Here are the results: 1ST schluppipuppie 67 points 2ND hoscalegeek 63 points 3RD Thatjeffcarter 59 points 4TH afleetingspeck 58 points 5TH AlienXXX 56 points 6TH klankbeeld 33 points 7TH Tarrei 28 points 8TH Kyster 26 points 8TH jgeralyn 18 points Full details here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/17717/?page=1#post44117 All entries can be found on this thread: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/17489/ In the meantime, dare 9 has been ‘warming up’… We are collecting some thematic samples up to the 10th Jan, see the thread here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/17659/ But no one knows yet what they will be asked to do with the samples once we got them on the Freesound database… it’s a bit of a mystery… So, come and join us… if you DARE!

Hello everyone, Yes, we know. Freesound is under a MASSIVE spammer attack. We’re discussing internally how we will handle this situation. Just deleting the spam message isn’t enough as those &*%$%! spammers are creating spam quicker than we can delete them. A few of the options we are discussing: More Captchas (funny words you have to type). All users who haven’t uploaded sounds yet and want to post on the forum will need to fill in the guess-the-squiggly-words thing. First-post-moderation. The first post of every new user is moderated. If that post is passed, you’re now free to post. We have enough active forum members to make this work, probably. Flood-protection. Right now you’re allowed to post as many messages in a single day as you like. We should limit this to max W per X minutes, max Y per hour, max Z per day. We could get these numbers from looking at the past for our most acive forum members. Akismet. Akismet is a -nonperfect- system/service that analyses a text and tells you if it’s spam or ham. Non-perfect because sometimes it flags spam as ham and vice-versa. We have this already running in freesound but right now we’re not doing anything active with the results. I.e. if a post is marked as spam we just store "hey this post is probably spam" but don’t stop the user from posting more. No posting more than X url’s in your first post. We used to have this in freesound "1″, we could revisit this idea. No posts until you have downloaded at least one sound. Some kind of flagging of spam posts + moderation. [Post your realistic ideas in the comments here!] We know that some of these are more work than others, and none of them are perfect solutions; for each of these options you can always come up with a "yes, but ….". So, we will have to make a choice and implement some of them. This should also apply to sound comments, because I fear the day those $%&#$%# discover those. Hang on people, this is going to take a while - Bram PS: On a more personal note: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh $&%^@#$$$$!

At the moment the votes for dare 9 are being counted and considerable computing power is being used to calculate the points for each participant (what a complicated points system that was!) While this takes place in the background, the Dare 10 has opened! This is the second dare inspired by suggestions from the ‘daring’ community so I hope you will enjoy it twice as much. It is great to have your participation both by entering and voting, but also by making your suggestions / comments / criticisms. So… if you are reading this… don’t just be a Freesounder… be a ‘daring’ Freesounder and join us for Dare 10… if you dare!

Hello all, On the 23rd of March I will be talking at the International Film Forum in Udine-Gorizia, Italy. My talk will be about freesound in general and its usage in Film/Video. I’m looking for additional examples of correctly credited Freesound usage in film and video. Have you ever had your sounds used in a video (with credits)? Have you ever used Freesound sounds in a video production (with credits)? Please let me know with as many details as you can, below. If you have screenshots of the credits, that would be great too… [EDIT] If you want to help: please send me screenshots and perhaps a small quote about your freesound usage: i.e. something that explains very shortly how you used freesound, what your experience with it was and maybe tell us if crediting was problematic or not. You can send this directly to me at support @ gro.dnuoseerf (reverse this last bit, but I’m sure you can guess it ) thanks a lot, - Bram

Hello everyone, We’re glad to announce that we have updated our Freesound t-shirts with the new logo! As you can see in the picture, new t-shirts are available in three different colors, men and women versions. They look amazing! Don’t they? Buying a t-shirt is another way to contribute to Freesound. For each t-shirt sold we get 5€ that will be reinvested in the maintenance of the site. Go and get yours before they are over! Then take a picture of yourself with the t-shirt and post it as a reply in this forum post! US, Canada and Asia shop: http://freesound.spreadshirt.com/ EU shop:  http://freesound.spreadshirt.net/ - frederic

This is really a short post aimed at anyone who has not yet heard of the ‘Dares’. These are friendly competitions that I run once a month. The themes change with every dares, essentially you are asked to do something with Freesound samples, adhering to a number of rules and then post your work for others to enjoy, comment and vote on. The list of winners from the previous dare is here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/32358/ And the current dare is open for submissions up to 11pm GMT on 31st March 2012. The rules and entries posted so far are on this thread: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/32336/ All entries from recent dares should be available at the following Soundcloud group: http://soundcloud.com/groups/freesound-dares

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

A note from our friends running Sounds of Barcelona: "Our Sounds of Barcelona project is participating in a EU contest for best innovations related to technological iniciatives with an educational and social impact. The  project Sons de Barcelona was created as an educational initiative around Freesound.org, running workshops in schools to foster interest in music technologies among the students community by using the Freesound ideas and technologies. You can find more information about the contest entry in: http://engageawards.com/entry/68 If you think that Sounds of Barcelona is a good initiative worth promoting, please vote for it." We love the work that the Barcelona people have started and basically love everything that combines kids and recording sounds. They are the future, you know! Please vote for them so they can continue their great work. - Bram