Freesound

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Freesound
Freesound's logo, stylised as 'freesound'.
Screenshot
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Created byBram de Jong, Freesound Team
URLfreesound.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationYes and required
LaunchedApril 5, 2005; 19 years ago (2005-04-05)
Current statusActive
Content license
Creative Commons

Freesound is a collaborative repository of Creative Commons licensed audio samples, and non-profit organisation, with more than 500,000 sounds and effects (as of May 2021),[1] and 8 million registered users (as of March 2019). Sounds are uploaded to the website by its users, and cover a wide range of subjects, from field recordings to synthesised sounds. Audio content in the repository can be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means as well as standard text-based search. Audio content in the repository is also analysed using the open-source audio analysis tool Essentia, which powers the similarity search functionality of the site. Freesound has a RESTful API through which third-party applications can access and retrieve audio content and its metadata.

Licensing

Freesound originally used the

CC BY-NC. Older samples remain under Sampling Plus unless their uploaders have relicensed
them.

All of these licenses allow use and distribution of the samples (modified or unmodified) for non-commercial purposes, and in the case of CC0 and CC BY also for commercial purposes. The Sampling Plus license does not allow unmodified samples to be distributed commercially, and therefore, like CC BY-NC, fails the Definition of Free Cultural Works and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and is not free enough to be used on Wikipedia, free software programs, and other projects requiring free content.

Release

The Freesound Project was officially launched on April 5,

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Frederic Font is heading the team responsible for developing and administrating the Freesound website.[2]

motion picture known to legally use a sample from Freesound in its production. The sound used was "male_Thijs_loud_scream.aiff" posted by the user thanvannispen, and the film properly attributes the sample in the credits.[3]

Features

  • Metadata tags
  • GeoTagging
  • Sample packs
  • Remix tree
  • Similarity search
  • Sound Bookmarks
  • Forum
  • Follow users and tags
  • Waveform display
  • HTML5/Flash preview
  • RESTful API
  • CC licensing

The features of Freesound are designed to make the sound files on the website easy to index, search, and browse. Since the licenses used (except

CC0
) stipulate that the authors of the original work must be credited in the derivative work, the site is capable of automatically generating an attribution list to make this easier.

Software architecture

The Freesound platform is based on technology developed by the Music Technology Group of the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.

The following web technologies are also used:

References

  1. ^ "We just reached 500k sounds… and Freesound got faster! | the Freesound Blog".
  2. ^ Myers, Rob. (August 29, 2009). The Freesound Project. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/freesound-project Archived July 9, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ de Jong, B. (January 13, 2007). Major motion picture using Freesound sample!!! The Freesound Project Announcements / News. Retrieved July 6, 2010, from https://freesound.org/index.php?start=39 Archived July 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ Essentia website
  5. ^ Source code available here.

External links

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