Freesound 2: An improved platform for sharing audio clips

Abstract

Freesound.org is an online collaborative sound database where people from different disciplines share recorded sound clips under Creative Commons licenses. It was started in 2005 and it is being further developed by the Music Technology Group (MTG) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Freesound’s initial goal was to give support to sound researchers, who often have trouble finding large royalty-free sound databases to test their algorithms, and to sound artists, who use pre-recorded sounds in their pieces. After six years since its inception, Freesound has become one of the most popular sites for sharing sound snippets. It serves around 30,000 unique visits per day and has more than two million registered users accessing the more than 120,000 uploaded sounds. Perhaps more importantly, there is a highly engaged community of users continuously contributing to the site, not only uploading sounds but also commenting, rating and discussing in the forums about relevant topics for the community. This remarkable growth surpassed our expectations and forced us to redesign and rebuild Freesound from scratch. This demo shows the new version of Freesound which brings a number of improvements and new functionalities. Some of these improvements facilitate the access to the content and provide a new framework for developers and researchers that are interested in working with Freesound. What follows is a summarized description of the system and the types of content that can be found.