Freesound Forums

Hi everyone,

As some of you will know, we have been mostly silently working on a new UI for Freesound during the last years. Even though it is not completely finished yet, we are extremely happy to announce that, from today, you can start using the new beta UI and give us some feedback so we can make it better, finish it, and eventually replace the current UI.

Just as a brief bit of context, in mid 2017 we contacted a UI/UX designer and asked him to design a new Freesound UI to give it a fresher look. What initially was only going to be a small update of the UI, ended up becoming a full rebuild of the Freesound frontend and parts of the backend. We have now ported most of Freesound pages to the new UI and are ready to open it for for beta testing. While we call the current UI (now old!) Nightingale (NG), the new UI is called Beast Whoosh (BW). We expect to continue working in the new UI during the first half of 2021, porting the missing pages and incorporating your feedback, and we expect to completely replace NG with BW at some point in 2021.

>>> How to participate in the public beta

• Everyone can participate in the BW public beta at any time by following this link: http://freesound.org/?fend=bw
• Once entered the public beta, you can navigate Freesound with the new UI. If you’re trying to visit a page that has not yet been ported to BW, the UI will simply fall back to the NG-version of that page and you’ll be able to continue browsing normally.
• The new UI is NOT a test site. BW uses the same database and backend as NG so everything you do in BW is the same as if you did it in NG (for example, if you make a sound comment in BW it will also appear in NG).
• You can leave the public beta at any time following the “Switch to old UI” button that you’ll find in BW “three dots” menu, or following this link http://freesound.org/?fend=ng

>>> How to provide feedback

• While in the public beta it is possible that you find some things that do not work as expected. Also, you might have suggestions for improvement. We want your feedback to complete the development of BW!
• To provide feedback, you should use this forum and create new threads/participate in existing conversations.
• Before opening a new thread, make sure that no thread already exists discussing the same topic.

>>> Pages not yet ported to BW

The pages below have not yet been ported to BW and will be ported in the near future:

• Messages
• Upload and describe
• Browse tags
• Remix groups
• Moderation
• Attribution
• Downloaders
• Activity stream
• Probably some more

>>> Overview of the new features

At first sight it you’ll see that BW looks completely different to NG. However, most of the functionality works exactly in the same way, as well as the site structure which has not really changed too much. Compared to the change from Freesound 1 to Freesound 2 back in 2011, BW and NG are much more similar as they share the same backend. However, some nice new features have been added to BW that hopefully you’ll like:

• Show spectrogram images instead of waveform by default. In your “account settings” page you’ll see an option to show spectrogram images by default. This is game changer for those who find spectrograms more informative than waveforms
• Timestamped sound comments and sound descriptions: you can now add timestamps to the sound comments and sound descriptions. If you type something like “#1:34” in a sound description or comment, this will be rendered as a small play button that will play the sound at exactly that time. Example here: https://freesound.org/people/frederic.font/sounds/516565/.
• Charts page: the “people” tab has disappeared, but instead we added a “charts” page (https://freesound.org/charts/) that will show most active users, top uploaders, etc. Please, fell free to propose new charts for that section and discuss about it.
• Tag filtering in geotags map: In the geotags page (now renamed to “map”), you have not the option to filter the sounds displayed by a tag. For example, you can listen to nightingales form different parts of the world: https://freesound.org/browse/geotags/nightingale/
• Pack searching: in the “advanced search” section of the search page, you’ll now have the option to “display results as packs”. This is slightly different from the current “group sounds by pack option” (which is still available) and provides a way to effectively search for packs instead of searching for sounds. This option is also used to replace the old “browse packs” page with the new “search packs” feature. There are some things to improve here (like sorting options which are not optimized for packs).
• The “random sound of the day” is now moved to the bottom of the front page and turned into a sort of game in which sound information is only shown after clicking the “reveal details” button.

We hope you enjoy the new Beast Whoosh UI!!!



I don't know what that is, but I'm excited!

frederic.font wrote:
... today, you can start using the new beta UI and give us some feedback so we can make it better, finish it, and eventually replace the current UI.

I'm not sure if the typical Freesound user is even aware there are spectrograms available,
so this may be a moot point, but, IMO, the new ones are not as clear: as if lower-res, lower-contrast versions ...

Beast Whoosh (BW)

Nightingale (NG)

Hi, thanks for the comment! that issue is already on the list of issues to fix

Some of the pale-grey text is difficult / impossible to read, e.g. "Attribution Noncommercial" ...

Nice! I hope there will be a dark mode.

I think you and the team knocked it out of the park. Everything is going so much faster and it looks terrific.

https://snipboard.io/xFrhlw.jpg
I tried to dark mode the website.

Thanks for your comments! Dark mode and issues with contrast have been reported in other threads as well, so we'll take that into consideration

New UI looks 'cleaner', but is less descriptive and very inefficient. The classic UI is compact and informative with much less wasted space and clicks, the changes feel like a step backwards in usability for unnecessary polish and simplification.

Looks much more modern, lightweight, and easy to use. The waveform player is also easier to use. The license details are more exposed to read at glance. It all feels more wholesome.

FreeSound remains an indispensable resource for my projects. I'm using it so much. Thanks to all the organizers and sound providers.

Great job.

I would really love to see a statistic for total downloads(Total number of downloads added up on my sounds), As opposed to just "Downloads" (the number of sounds I have downloaded).

As seeing the total number of times my sounds have been downloaded is an interesting metric I'd like to view at a glance . Other than that, I love the new UI.

Beast Whoosh should be optional. Keep the Nightingale UI, like how Reddit lets you choose between the new UI and old UI.

ewanmckinlay6 wrote:
Beast Whoosh should be optional. Keep the Nightingale UI, like how Reddit lets you choose between the new UI and old UI.

I agree with the principal, but the extra work to maintain the original NG UI and keep it up to date and compatible with new UI Develops becomes impossible, especially for a small team like FS, no matter how passionate they are. It's why Microsoft sadly ditches old windows versions and starts again as new features and functions are added. (Day-to-day I still prefer and use Win Vista but was forced to buy Win 10 just to access a few important sites - banking etc. Other than security and compatibility I have no interest in anything extra Win10 can do that WinVista can't.)

Keeping both versions in parallel for a while is extra work for devs, but would give valuable statistics as to what users prefer. Afraid I would stick to the old, but I'm only one vote.

Also must take care interpreting the stats. Are users spending twice as much time on WB because they like it twice as much, or because it takes twice as long to find what they're looking for?

Wibby

Hi, thanks for your comments!

Yeah, maintaining two UIs will be impossible for the incredibly small team Freesound is. But hey, we're very nice people and will work on improving new UI listening to your feedback and making it great for everyone together

After the development efforts on the new UI that I did ~1 year ago and which led to its first beta release, now I plan to intensively work on it again to see if I can finish the remaining pages and improve the existing ones according to the received feedback. Hopefully I'll be able to release many updates in the coming months. There is a lot of work to be done still, but it is going to be worth it!

But please, keep the old layout optional.

Postpone the new UI to sometime in 2023.

Can not see my downloads in the new ui

I am not a fan of the new UI

Hi,

Thanks for your comment @EliasSFX. There are many things which are still missing, downloads list is one of them. But this will be there once new UI is fully ready.

@klankbeeld Thanks for your message as well. Yeah, maybe for some users it will take more time to get used to it, but the new UI has many improvements with respect to the current one not only in terms of features/design but also technically it is a step that we need to follow. Nevertheless, we will work on improving the new UI according to the feedback received, and will also be open in the future for more changes. So far, the main criticism that the new UI has received has been that it has too much space, specially in the search page where you have to scroll a lot. I'll think about how to fix that and/or even provide a "compact" mode for pro users. If you have some time, maybe you can review the threads in the new UI feedback forum and make sure that all the things you don't like are represented there.

The idea is that we all can participate to shape it and make it great for the community.

Cheers,