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 18th ,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 26th 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    

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

Hello everyone, some months ago we introduced a new anti-spam measure to reduce the amount of spam in the forums. This has been working quite well, but we are aware that there is still spam out there and we have been advised that spam is still being sent through private messages. For that reason, we introduced a new feature that allows the Freesound community to collaboratively help removing spam. You’ll now be able to report sound comments, forum posts or private messages as being spam. We’ll keep track of these reports, and manually "check" these users whose comments, posts and messages have repeatedly being marked as spam. That is all for the moment! Keep on freesounding! the Freesound team

Be afraid!…. Be very afraid! Because the Dares are back! And this month we celebrate Halloween so we await for your scary entries… if YOU dare! Muaah ah ah ah ah ! http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/32980/

Hello everyone! the server that is currently hosting Freesound is getting older and has realised that time has arrived to leave this job for younger and faster machines. For that reason tomorrow (thursday 25th of October) we’re migrating Freesound to our brand new servers! With that hardware upgrade we’ll be able to handle more requests and make Freesound faster. Downtime will start around 11 AM (Spanish time, GMT+1). We are planning to be back before 5 PM. After the migration we will greatly appreciate if you notify us about anything you see that is not working well. Freesound has been constantly growing and has become quite a complex system with many many many little things to take into account! That is all for the moment! the Freesound team

The Freesound team proudly announces that we have finished the migration and are finally back! If you find any bugs or broken things please report them in the forums or using the contact form. Thank you for your patience and understanding!   - the Freesound team

Hello everyone! As some of you will know Freesound is an open source project and the source code is released under the Affero General Public License 3.0 license. This post is to inform those interested that we have moved our public repository from Assembla to Github. In fact, during the first years of Freesound 2 development the code was already hosted on Github, so we are actually moving back!  Therefore, from now on you’ll find the code in https://github.com/mtg/freesound. - the Freesound team

Hello everyone, today we have updated Freesound search functionalities with some improvements we have been working on in the last weeks. First of all, we have added a new sorting algorithm that automatically sorts the search results according to their relevance with respect to the introduced query terms. This is now the sorting option by default, but you can still sort sounds according to their number of downloads, average rating, creation date or duration. Moreover, we also added a search option called Group sounds by pack which basically collapses all search results belonging to sounds of the same pack in a single entry that can then be expanded with a provided link. With that option we prevent filling pages of search results with very similar sounds. Group sounds by pack is enabled by default, but you can switch it off using the advanced search options. We have also slightly changed the behavior of Most downloaded sounds list in the sounds page. As some of you requested in the forums, we are now displaying a list of the most downloaded sounds only among those uploaded during the last week. In this way we promote more popular new sounds instead of all-time popular sounds. We hope you enjoy these improvements! Take them as a Christmas present from the Freesound Team   Happy freesounding!

Hello all, It’s not always easy to describe your sound files, we know. Hoever, we did want to let you know that even we at freesound are impressed at this example of a perfect description. The uploader describes the recording gear, the environment, why he uploaded the file, etc etc. Thanks a lot Philip Goddard! If everyone would use 1/10th the description power Mr. Goddard seems to wield freesound would be an even better place. - Bram

A number of people have been encountering problems recently while downloading sounds on freesound. We apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. We have tracked the issue down to a misconfigured router in the freesound network. This fault has been resolved and downloads should return to normal. Once again, sorry to those who this error has affected.

Hi all, It looks like the private message spammers have really started liking us lately. Almost daily I’m deleting spammers. For now the best is to "report as spam" as soon as you get a spam message: if more than a few people do this the person will be blocked from sending further messages immediately. Other than this we are also looking into severely restricting the message-sending capabilities of people who have not done certain actions yet on the site. I won’t say which because this might be a hint for the spammers, but the idea is that if you haven’t done X or Y on the site you won’t be able to send more than X messages per minute/hour/day. Sorry for the annoyance! - Bram

Hello dear Freesounders! After almost eight years of great sounds and constant growth it has become necessary to define some terms of use for Freesound. These terms are intented to outline the legal aspects of Freesound and to clarify your rights as users, our privacy policy and, in general, to protect you and us against incorrect uses of the site. By adding these terms of use we have not changed the philosophy of the site. It is just a necessary step to keep on growing and improving Freesound! In order to continue using Freesound you’ll have to accept these terms of use. But hey, don’t worry because they are not excessively long to read and we have also created a friendly version of the terms which makes them much easier to understand. Here is a brief summary of the terms: Uploaded sounds are released under one of the CC licenses you choose. Other content (metadata, tags, comments, etc…) is provided as CC-Zero. Your activity in Freesound is public and can be seen by all users (except your private messages). You are responsible for your posted content. We (Freesound) keep your data confidential and apply security measures to keep this confidentiality. We (Freesound) don’t warrant that all the data on the site is correct. We are not liable for information not posted by us on this site. We (Freesound) may remove accounts of users that do not comply with the terms or who do not behave correctly (spam, offensive comments…). We can use anonymized data collected from Freesound (statistics about sounds, tags, comments, downloads…) for research purposes. You agree to receive email notifications from us. You can read the full text and the friendly version here. Starting tomorrow (1/3/13), the first time you log in to Freesound you’ll see a screen saying that you have to accept the terms of use before continue using Freesound. That screen will contain the same explanation you’re reading here. Thank you for your patience and understanding! We really appreciate the commitment of the Freesound community!!!    

We know you beatbox. Yes you… Yes, we mean YOU! We know you beatbox in the shower, or maybe in the car (as you listen to the radio waiting for the green at the traffic lights). Some of you are so shy you only beatbox in you head!… But you still do. So… while I take a much needed rest from running the dares, my friend Afleetingspeck would like to get us all beatboxing. Read the dare challenge here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/33571/ and decide if you can beat it!

On April 5th will be the 8th anniversary of Freesound, and thanks to your contributions more than 160,000 sounds have been shared with the community so far! Now, the Freesound team would like to look back in the Freesound history and find some of the most original or unusual sounds that have been uploaded during all these years. That’s why we need your help: In your opinion, which are the most amazing / surprising / coolest sounds you have ever found on Freesound? Please leave your comments here: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/   Thank you for all these years of cool sounds!!!  

Today is the 8th anniversary of Freesound! Congratulations to the researchers, developers, moderators, donors and users who have been and are part of this project for the success achieved so far. Thanks to the collaboration of this great community we have now more than 160.000 free sounds from all over the world. Freesound was started in 2005 in the Music Technology Group (MTG). One of the first aims behind it was to create an open repository of sounds to be used for scientific and artistic research, but quickly became a very popular site used by a wide variety of people to share sounds and the experiences around them. Freesound has now 3.5 million registered users around the world, about 40.000 visits a day, and the total number of visits in those eight years has been more than 57 million, coming from almost all the countries of the world. There are many successful usages of the sounds in Freesound, for example in the movie Children of Men and in a song of the internationally known band The Prodigy. Freesound has received several awards, such as a BMW award, a Barcelona City award and a Google research award twice. But what is most important, during all those years users have shared really amazing sounds. Find the opinion of the community about the coolest sounds on Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/ The interest for sharing sounds keeps growing and the community of active users of Freesound is also growing. For the MTG, Freesound offers an exceptional framework with which to carry research in the context of semantic web technologies. But we are specially proud of being able to offer a very useful service to the society.

Hello there Freesounders! we would like to announce that we have introduced a couple of small new features, some of them were requested in the forums. First of all, we have increased the number of sounds that can be described per round from 4 to 10. This will be specially useful for users that tend to upload a lot of sounds at once, and will help you have your sounds described quicker. Also to easy up the description process, you will now be able to see the description of more than one sound at a time. We also added query term highlighting in the sound descriptions of the search results page. Furthermore we have added some minor layout improvements, fine-tuned anti-spam measures and updated the moderation interface in order to promote oldest sounds at the beginning of the queue. This way sound moderation will become closer to "first in first out".  And now that I’m talking about sound moderation, don’t forget that moderators are humans and do this task voluntarily in their free time. They take this responsibility very seriously and always do the moderation as fast as they can! They deserve a biiiiig hurrayyyy from the whole Freesound community! Said that, keep on Freesounding!

Edit: Because you can see this message it means we’re back, sooner than expected. Thank you for your patience. Dear Freesounders, On Wednesday May 29 at 1 a.m. CEST (28th 7 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern) Freesound will be down for a few hours while we perform some maintenance on our Internet connection. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

Dear Freesounders, As part of our research towards improving Freesound we are developing a tag recommendation system to help Freesound users tagging their sounds when they are uploaded. Before implementing the system into Freesound we have started a testing phase in which we will compare several strategies for tag recommendation that we have developed. We will choose the best recommendation system according to your input. For this, we kindly ask you to participate in an 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. Once we close the experiment we will randomly select two of the participants to receive a Freesound t-shirt as a reward! Thank you very much in advance for your participation. We believe you’ll enjoy the experiment and will be of invaluable in helping to improve Freesound. keep on Freesounding! ps: you can leave comments and suggestions here

Dear Freesounders, On Wednesday July 10 at 11 p.m. CEST (5 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern) Freesound will be down for a few hours while we perform some additional maintenance on our Internet connection. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

Hey there freesounders! You all know what Freesound is all about and why you like using it. However, if you want to know a bit more just watch this promotional video we’ve just released: Share this video and help us promote Freesound and make this amazing community bigger and bigger!

The dares are comming back to life! So Freesounders, I dare you to participate… http://www.freesound.org/forum/dare-the-community/34322/

Researchers on the Good Recording Project (University of Salford, UK) have just launched a new Web experiment investigating audio quality in Freesound samples. The AudioBattle experiment presents participants with pairs of real samples taken from Freesound and asks them to rate which is better. The researchers hope to discover how well we can predict quality from audio features in recordings and in the metadata of sounds submitted to Freesound. The experiment takes no more than 10 minutes and all participants are able to enter a prize draw once they finish. To take part in the experiment please visit: http://www.goodrecording.net/audiobattle/

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!

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.