Freesound just reached 500K Creative Commons sounds

Freesound just reached 500K Creative Commons sounds(blog.freesound.org)

772 points by diibv 5 years ago | 67 comments

alastairp 5 years ago |

I'm a researcher at the Music Technology group who works on freesound (https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg)

We also maintain Freesound labs, which lists a lot of projects and research made using content from freesound: https://labs.freesound.org/

FSD50k is our hand-curated dataset of sounds designed for research in sound and event recognition tasks https://zenodo.org/record/4060432#.X3xrgi8RqL4, http://dcase.community/challenge2019/task-audio-tagging

Vinnl 5 years ago | |

I'm sure it's not what you had in mind when it comes to use cases for Freesound, but it's what made this VSCode extension possible: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VincentT...

So thanks... I guess :)

qorrect 5 years ago | | |

Haha, nice.

ngold 5 years ago | |

Freesound is an amazing project. Thanks for the labs link. Good to know.

gerdesj 5 years ago | |

Thank you. [Birds twittering on laptop speakers]

What a resource. Here's a random sound: https://freesound.org/people/Bosk1/sounds/144083/

lapinot 5 years ago | | |

my personal favorite https://freesound.org/people/sirplus/sounds/90644/

jtbayly 5 years ago | | |

A random sound with a typo. Lol.

laymonage 5 years ago | |

Thank you for your work! It has helped me a lot :)

DyslexicAtheist 5 years ago | |

this is great thanks. I might finally be able to find the new sound I've been searching for so long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQLlR4pvhyg

ChrisMarshallNY 5 years ago | |

Before this, I did not know this resource existed.

Thanks so much!

swyx 5 years ago |

more free sound resources that I collect:

- https://www.zapsplat.com/

- https://www.myinstants.com

- https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music?nv=1

- https://www.icons8.com/music

- https://www.cchound.com 100% free, quality CC audio

- https://www.aaraalto.com/sounds a few brief guitar samples for podcast transitions

- https://www.transistor.fm/free-podcast-intro-music free podcast intro music

and some paid stuff in the list https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy#sound

PaulDavisThe1st 5 years ago | |

https://www.pianobook.co.uk/ has hundreds of no-charge sample libraries (many pianos, lots of other things). The most common format is for Kontakt (non-libre, but available for Windows & macOS at no cost). There's quite a few in DecentSampler format and a few SFZ. It's not hard to extract the audio files from any of them if you need to.

swyx 5 years ago | | |

excellent, ty

BrunoJo 5 years ago | |

Pixabay is another great resource for completely free music: https://pixabay.com/music/

kfarr 5 years ago | |

Awesome list, thanks for sharing. I'll admit I'm also commenting so I remember this in the future...

swyx 5 years ago | | |

or you could... yknow... star my repo :)

jb1991 5 years ago | |

That YouTube link appears to be broken for me.

jarmitage 5 years ago |

In case you didn't know, Freesound has an API: https://freesound.org/docs/api/

And publications: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=freesound

I believe it's managed by the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg

You can support it with donations: https://freesound.org/donations/donate/

PaulDavisThe1st 5 years ago | |

At one point in time, Ardour (x-platform, FLOSS DAW) let you directly search and download from Freesound within the program.

We stopped doing that when their authentication API changed. They've subsequently changed it to something that would allow the functionality to be restored, but nobody has found the time to do that yet.

mxmilkiib 5 years ago | |

https://github.com/ffont/FreesoundSimpleSampler - demonstrates the use of the freesound-juce API client; the user can create a textual query to Freesound.org and 16 random sounds are loaded in a sampler.

https://github.com/aframires/FreesoundUploader - for uploading sounds to Freesound.org without opening a web browser

dang 5 years ago |

Looks like only one small past thread:

Freesound: A collaborative database of Creative Commons-licensed sounds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8858076 - Jan 2015 (6 comments)

atoav 5 years ago |

As a freelance rerecording mixer I regularily used sounds from freesound and felt it was my duty to contribute with sounds I couldn't find. I still get notifications once or twice a week about some sound being used in a game or a film.

dukeofdoom 5 years ago |

I was watching some kid from Germany go into how he creates the sound track for his youtube videos. And quickly realized I underestimated the effort it takes to make youtube video. What seemed like a simple video, had a 15 layer sound track. Some people spend more time on editing the sounds than the video.

Here he explains how he does it if anyone is interested.

https://youtu.be/CpE8Xdv9GF0

superasn 5 years ago | |

Yeah but what's scary is Youtube's automatic copyright strikes. I was watching this video where a guy created a soundtrack using samples from a site like freesound (the whole video was actually about making your own Youtube tracks) and as soon the video uploaded.. boom 5 minutes later he gets a copyright strike. He said in the video it happens a lot when you use freely available samples since the algorithm often confuses it. It was sometime back so I don't have the link right now but uploading Youtube and getting copyright notices sounds fucking scary that I wouldn't want do it at all.

dbspin 5 years ago | | |

Part of the reason (perhaps the whole reason) for that is that there's a cohort of people who upload commercial sounds to freesound for some reason. Extremely annoying.

dhosek 5 years ago |

I’m vaguely reminded of when I was charged with adding sounds to a Java applet game. As a joke I added a five minute sequence of “dying” sounds I found online somewhere. Each death scream was separated with about a second of silence. It was a beautifully comic effect as it just kept going on and on and on. We were tempted to shift it as an Easter egg but it dramatically increased the size of the applet and this was the days of most people accessing the internet via dialup.

Smithalicious 5 years ago | |

You should've made it rarely trigger during Halloween

Imagine the urban legends

dhosek 5 years ago | | |

The biggest challenge was, this was 2000 and MP3s were still a new technology and Java of that era could only play uncompressed audio samples.

tomc1985 5 years ago |

Fun story, I uploaded some recordings of the family dog playing a very rough-sounding game of tug-of-war with me. I got a bunch of great growls and snarls from it, and they are uploaded to Freesound.

She's since passed, I think those are my only audio recordings of her.

shoto_io 5 years ago |

Is there anything similar for entire songs?

miniwark 5 years ago | |

https://freemusicarchive.org/

https://www.jamendo.com/

https://cchound.com/

http://ccmixter.org/

And probably many more

shoto_io 5 years ago | | |

Thanks, jamendo seems not be free of charge though.

senkora 5 years ago | |

Libre.fm is good for discovering CC music. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to search but there are genre tags.

https://libre.fm/listen.php

Turing_Machine 5 years ago | |

https://musopen.org/

Has sound recordings and also sheet music. Mostly classical/orchestral.

CodeArtisan 5 years ago | |

https://opengameart.org/

https://itch.io/game-assets/free/tag-music

aquietlife 5 years ago | |

Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/

pabs3 5 years ago | |

I wonder if there are any sites for collaboratively created songs where the source data for each song is also shared.

Flex247A 5 years ago | |

http://www.nihilore.com/

yorwba 5 years ago | | |

That appears to be one person publishing their music under CC-BY. That's nice of them, but not similar to Freesound's massive collection.

I think http://www.ccmixter.org/ would be a more likely candidate, or SoundCloud's search restricted to CC licenses. There are also lots of musicians publishing CC music on Bandcamp, but the site doesn't allow filtering by license. The best approximation I've found is searching "some rights reserved" site:bandcamp.com with DDG and then checking which license the link points to.

asiachick 5 years ago |

I don't think this issue is specific to freesound but has anyone ever figured out a way to make sounds easy to find? I guess ML might help if could take what's in the sounds (people do that too but they are often wrong or motivated to use false tags). I find finding good and appropriate sounds the hardest part.

diibv 5 years ago | |

Hi, I'm another researcher at the Music Technology Group, which runs Freesound. Definitely, this one of our long-time challenges.

Facilitating search and exploration is one of our main research directions related to Freesound. We do audio ML research, in particular, audio-based auto-tagging (see the already mentioned Freesound Datasets https://annotator.freesound.org/fsd/ we've built for this purpose) but also similarity and clustering based on audio analysis and tags.

So far, Freesound API provides similarity search and audio analysis features.

Have a look at the Freesound Explorer, which is an example of a 2D sound exploration interface built on top of audio features: https://labs.freesound.org/apps/2017/08/21/freesound-explore...

kragen 5 years ago |

We've come a long way since sounds.sdsu.edu, both in terms of the volume of sound files publicly on the internet and in terms of the legal protection of users against copyright.

Still, there was something magical about downloading that first copy of Tori Amos's Crucify as a 64-kbps .au file, that seems to be missing from today's internet...

sdenton4 5 years ago | |

You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.

Ericson2314 5 years ago |

I was wondering if there was something like this.

Whatever the main commercial sound effect database is, it's not big enough, because I am always hearing the same sounds and it's uncanny. For example, I think a Camel in John Wick 3 makes the same sound as in Age of Empiress 2.

mrfox321 5 years ago | |

Diablo 2 monster sound effects always seem to show up in random places.

josefx 5 years ago |

And how many of those are correctly licensed? I already found one that directly mentioned that it was ripped from a YouTube video and if this is in any way like free 3d model collections it will be stuffed with assets ripped from commercial games.

kennywinker 5 years ago | |

In my experience, the vast majority are user-created sounds

TonyTrapp 5 years ago | | |

Indeed. And you can tell it's genuine when people list the tools they used, where they recorded it, etc...

ipsum2 5 years ago |

I don't know if the maintainers of Freesound are around, but this file https://freesound.org/media/html_player/img/icon_background.... is loaded every couple miliseconds when the audio file plays, resulting in tens of thousands of image loads per page.

alastairp 5 years ago | |

Interesting, thanks for the report. I can't see this behaviour when testing myself. Do you mean that there is a network load of the file every few milliseconds, or that the file disappears and reappears in the DOM? From what I can tell, this file is added with static CSS, so it shouldn't be reloading all the time. Are you playing from the search results page, or a sound page? Bug reports are welcome: https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues

Andrew_nenakhov 5 years ago |

Very good project, all sounds in our app use resources taken from this site. It has very good search function that crucially allows you too specify license.

teknopaul 5 years ago |

Top tool. I'm a regular.

Ben fet nois!

tech234a 5 years ago |

Many of the sounds used in Minecraft came from Freesound[1].

[1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/attribution/sound

akomtu 5 years ago |

Good stuff. I use freesound from time to time. Their download speeds could be better, though. I see no reason why their can't provide a torrent link for every song.

area51org 5 years ago | |

I half expected there to be a torrent for the entire collection. Slightly surprised there isn't one.

reputet 5 years ago |

TL;DR: It's more about short sounds like birdsong, weather, etc than music. Although, I saw some music samples as well.

Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, and all sorts of bleeps, ...

https://freesound.org/help/about/

Nice project.

schemescape 5 years ago | |

Thanks for the explanation (esp. since the blog post doesn't appear to even link back to the main web site).

ivanche 5 years ago | | |

You've probably missed it, it's at the top, just under the image. There are 2 links: "Home" and "Back to freesound.org". You need the second one.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5 years ago |

Is there any way to download without creating an account.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5 years ago | |

Is there any technical reason that an account is needed to download a free, public file. Is there a business reason. Users might want to know.

parisianka 5 years ago |

Keep going!

rationalData 5 years ago |

Any contributors here? Thank you for making the world a better place. It's inspiring!

dinosuno 5 years ago |

With AI generative sounds, it should reach next 500k within months.

anitil 5 years ago | |

My understanding is that this is for original content, which can then be used as a corpus to make generated sounds