Freesound is a collaborative

repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), an ...

audio samples In sound and music, sampling is the reuse of a portion (or sample) of a sound recording in another recording. Samples may comprise elements such as rhythm, melody, speech, sounds or entire bars of music, and may be layered, equalized, sped up or ...

, and non-profit organisation, with more than 500,000 sounds and effects (as of May 2021), 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 recording Field recording is the term used for an audio recording produced outside a recording studio, and the term applies to recordings of both natural and human-produced sounds. It also applies to sound recordings like electromagnetic fields or vibra ...

s to synthesised sounds. Audio content in the repository can be

tagged Tagged may refer to: * Tagged (website), a social discovery website * Tagged (web series), an American teen psychological thriller web series {{disambiguation ...

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

REST Rest or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and enter ...

ful API through which third-party applications can access and retrieve audio content and its metadata.

Licensing

Freesound originally used the CC Sampling Plus license for all samples, but has since switched to using

CC0 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

CC BY A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

, and

CC BY-NC A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. C ...

. 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 The Definition of Free Cultural Works is a definition of free content from 2006. The project evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses. History The Open Content Project by David A. Wiley in 1998 was a predecessor project which ...

and the

Debian Free Software Guidelines The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in De ...

, 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, 2005 in the context of the 2005

International Computer Music Conference The International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) is a yearly international conference for computer music researchers and composers. It is the annual conference of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). History In 1986, the Inst ...

. It is a project of the

Music Technology Group The Music Technology Group (MTG) is a research group of thDepartment of Information and Communication Technologiesof the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. It was founded in 1994 by its current director, Xavier Serra, and it specializes in sou ...

Universitat Pompeu Fabra Pompeu Fabra University ( ca, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF, ; es, link=no, Universidad Pompeu Fabra) is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia in Spain. The university was created by the Autonomous Government of Catalo ...

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

. Frederic Font is heading the team responsible for developing and administrating the Freesound website. '' Children of Men'' was the first major 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.

Features

* Metadata tags *

GeoTagging Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data u ...

*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

) 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. *Similarity searches based on automatically extracted audio features using Essentia audio analysis tool. * Spectral centroid waveform displaySource code availabl
here
The following web technologies are also used: *

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

scripting * PostgreSQL database *

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features a ...

text search

References

External links

*
Creative Commons interview with Bram de Jong

Using Freesound with ccMixter
{{DEFAULTSORT:Freesound Open content projects Projects established in 2005 Internet properties established in 2005 2005 establishments in Spain Creative Commons-licensed databases Stock media