Freesound Forums

Hi everyone!

Please, use this forum thread to lave your feedback about the pre-release version of the new Beast Whoosh user interface which has just been released.

Also, be sure to check the new user interface FAQ section to learn more about it, including the new features.

Thanks!!

Hi Frederic and team,

thank you very much for all your work on the freesound site.

My first reaction: I prefer a dark background. It gives more rest to the eyes. You built that in nicely. My Firefox preferences (dark) are followed just fine.

thanks thanks.

Hello Frederic

I love the new design and my profile bio merges very well with the new UI.

Is there still room for improvement?
Can users add featured sounds to their profile so that other users would see those sounds first, more like a highlight of what this sound creator would like for people visiting their profile to see first.

As much as I like the old design I would still like to visit and occasionally use the old UI at times.
Does the old design absolutely need to be removed when the new UI is implemented?

For the moderation pages, what are the changes, if any going to happen with the new UI?

Thanks for all the hard work freesound team, you guys are true masters of your craft and look forward to the final release.

J.P

Seconding Erokia's question: Is it your intention to make the new UI the only option?

I mis the button for latest comments in general and for my own sounds. I read this every day.

Headphaze knows what it is useful for. I scan the comments on spam

Regards

The contrast of some text is too low ...

There are guidelines for such things ... https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html

Individual sounds take up too much vertical space. More scrolling = more energy spent, more time lost.

The new sound grouping on the profile page cuts descriptions short, hides tags and groups things into a grid so that the users' eyes now have to move both horizontally and vertically to take in the information.

Users now have to click twice to get to their own profiles.

The cooltype background color #10101D conflicts with the otherwise warmtype color scheme, causing weak (but noticeable) eye strain. Easy enough to change with Dark Reader, though.

There is still too much margin space on either side.

Allowing any user's forum post history to be searched directly from their page is likely to encourage spambots and general harassment.

Batch describing sounds is still unnecessarily complicated. The batch button should just display a form where the user can enter details to be applied to everything being described.

Some people will not be able to read "foley" & "sample" at the bottom of this gif

Contrast is waaay too low.

When I describe a new sound I can choose from my sound packs. With the old UI I can type existing pack and UI jumps to it. Not anymore. Now I have to scroll.

Hi everyone,
Thanks a lot for your feedback so far! I'll provide some answers below. As new feedback is posted, I'll provide more answers. Here we go:

Erokia wrote:
Can users add featured sounds to their profile so that other users would see those sounds first, more like a highlight of what this sound creator would like for people visiting their profile to see first.

This is a great idea! I'll add it to the list of things to do. I don't thnk it would be ready for the next release but later in the future.

Erokia wrote:
Does the old design absolutely need to be removed when the new UI is implemented?

Yes it does. We are an incredibly small team and can't maintain two different UIs at the same time

Erokia wrote:
For the moderation pages, what are the changes, if any going to happen with the new UI?

My initial plan is to replicate same functionality that already exists, maybe take the opportunity to add some new useful things. I have note some suggestions from past converations, but feel free to suggest new ones (maybe not in this thread but trhough the moderator's mailing list).

klankbeeld wrote:
I mis the button for latest comments in general and for my own sounds.

About latest comments "in geneal", yeah you're right that this "dissapeared" and it is not the first time you mention that The original "new" design does not incorporate this funcionality because we did not seem to see much interest from users (according to visits to the People page). However I'll think about where could we re-add such a feature. Maybe the "Charts" section could be renamed to "Charts and activity" and incorporate "recent activity" information similar to what the current People page has.

Timbre wrote:
The contrast of some text is too low ...

I actually increase the contrast of the light grey text with respect to the previous beta release, but I'll look at increasing it even more.

Timbre wrote:
Some people will not be able to read "foley" & "sample" at the bottom of this gif

Well, in that particular case (the list of tags with gradual opacity), the idea is that tags which are less visible are less "important" (instead of using size as in the current Freesound, we used opacity). I'll play around with different ways to handle that, for example increasing the "minimum opacity", or having a fixed opacity, or setting something else.

strangehorizon wrote:
Individual sounds take up too much vertical space. More scrolling = more energy spent, more time lost.

This was discussed a lot in the previous beta. I improved that a little bit for the new version, making the "search sound result" a bit more compact and reducing margins. Also, I added a "grid" mode that will display searchr results in a grid (although I suspect you don't lik grids ) which allows you to check more results witout scrolling. That "grid mode" is now pretty basic as it does not show much sound information, but that could be further improved.

strangehorizon wrote:
The new sound grouping on the profile page cuts descriptions short, hides tags and groups things into a grid so that the users' eyes now have to move both horizontally and vertically to take in the information.

I think this is related with the previous comment. I guess I could try to display the sound information that is included when displaying sounds in a grid. Adding tags requires a lot of space, but maybe some extra icons could be added for license, pack, etc. The whole idea of using a grid here (and actually in all sound players that do not take the full width) is that we can show more in a single row.

strangehorizon wrote:
Users now have to click twice to get to their own profiles.

That is true and I don't see how I could fix that. Well, would you be happy with alt+click on the user avatar in the top navigation bar redirects to the user profile page instead of opening the menu? (alt+click is used as a pro shortcut in a couple of other places in Freesound so maybe it could be acceptable). That said, now there are other things that require only one click like accessing the tags and map page.

strangehorizon wrote:
The cooltype background color #10101D conflicts with the otherwise warmtype color scheme, causing weak (but noticeable) eye strain. Easy enough to change with Dark Reader, though.

Do you have a specific suggestion of a color that might fit better there? I can try changing that color.

strangehorizon wrote:
There is still too much margin space on either side.

I'm afraid this is deeply embeded in the design and will not be changed. However, there's less margin now in the new UI than in the "old" UI

strangehorizon wrote:
Allowing any user's forum post history to be searched directly from their page is likely to encourage spambots and general harassment.

You're right about that. I now realized that this option is only available to moderators in the "old" UI, so I'll replicate the same thing.

**EDIT**: I just removed that link (although in some profiles it might still appear for some hours)

strangehorizon wrote:
Batch describing sounds is still unnecessarily complicated. The batch button should just display a form where the user can enter details to be applied to everything being described.

Well, it has improved a bit, but I agree that it could be further improved by being able to use a single form to edit all sounds. I see that as a next step for improvement. Now we re-worked the description/editing backend code so they basically provide the same features (including editing multiple sounds at once). Now we can think of further improvements. Not sure about the single form idea, but what about adding a button to all form fields for all sounds to "copy field to all other sounds"?

I do love the modern look of the UI however, as an uploader I would really love to see the total number of downloads my account has accumulated throughout all my sounds, this would save me calculating milestones manually.

I like the fresh look. just wish there was a way to view the total number of downloads my sounds have accumulated. as opposed to just total number of sounds I have downloaded.

Other than that, great work! its pretty sleek!

hi
is there a way to go back to the previous interface ? i liked that one much more and feel really lost in this new one (too polished... :/)
thanksss

Thanks @M-Murray for the suggestion, I just replaced the "total number of sounds downloaded" number in the account profile stats by the total number of downloads on user's sounds and packs. It might still require some time for the number to be updated in all profiles.

I appreciate the detailed responses.

For the bgcolor, I would recommend either #1D100A (warmtype version of the original color) or #1B1E1F (the neutral color which I presently see using Dark Reader).

For the alt+click profile shortcut, I'm wary of using Alt too often, as typoing while the Alt buckybit is active can make any number of things go wrong. I'll just have to get used to that one...

If the old UI can't be maintained, can it at least remain accessible? You can always disclaim yourself by saying it's no longer supported and might not work. It's just static code, right? I don't recall seeing dynamic elements in the old UI or the new...

RE: your idea to have a button "copy field to all other sounds": This sounds good. Independent buttons for copying tags and descriptions respectively would be even better.
Alternatively, it could be something like YouTube's system. When editing a YouTube draft, there's a button called "Reuse Details" which allows a user to selectively apply details from a previous upload. So there's a checkbox next to Tags, one next to Description, one for Pack assignment, etc.

Finally, I'd like to second klankbeeld's request for access to the "All comments on user's sounds" functionality because I also use this to find fans and spammers alike. It helps me know what kinds of sounds my viewers want and how they're being used. Without this functionality, the only way to get them all is to have FS email me for every comment, which uses up some of your bandwidth and can sometimes be quite fatiguing for the user. Basically, this option helps me moderate things so that the actual mods have less work to do.

I do believe that if it is possible, can the new UI automatically translate languages into English.

With respect to still moderating sounds, Ill still observe the descriptions and make sure they are detailed when users upload and describe with their native language.

Having an automatic translation would mean more sounds will get through moderation quicker and be less of a hassle on my end.

Many sounds don't get approved because the user doesn't care to translate so I do believe this would be of huge importance to have implemented.

I'll discuss other moderation suggestions with you privately at another date Frederic.

Thanks!

J.P

I just uploaded a sound to try and I must agree with klankbeeld about having to scroll to find the pack name now, the old way was much faster and handy if you knew the pack name already.
The other thing I noticed that is small and probably just me, when the process of uploading/describing was complete and it goes back the the "manage sounds" page, the first thing to catch my eye is the sad frown face which immediately made me think something bad had happened and the upload didn't work. Of course I then read the text but possibly a bit unnecessarily startling.

strangehorizon wrote:
For the bgcolor, I would recommend either #1D100A (warmtype version of the original color) or #1B1E1F (the neutral color which I presently see using Dark Reader).

I'll try these colors!

strangehorizon wrote:
If the old UI can't be maintained, can it at least remain accessible? You can always disclaim yourself by saying it's no longer supported and might not work. It's just static code, right? I don't recall seeing dynamic elements in the old UI or the new...

I'm afraid we can't keep it. Besides the static JS and CSS code, there are parts of the backend that get complex because of having 2 UIs and want to simplify that to facilitate maintenance. Also there are some dynamic things which would become hard to maintain. But we're open to modifications in the new UI so it works great for everyone. Even after the "final" release we can keep on talking and improving it if you guys are not getting used

strangehorizon wrote:
Finally, I'd like to second klankbeeld's request for access to the "All comments on user's sounds" functionality because I also use this to find fans and spammers alike. It helps me know what kinds of sounds my viewers want and how they're being used. Without this functionality, the only way to get them all is to have FS email me for every comment, which uses up some of your bandwidth and can sometimes be quite fatiguing for the user. Basically, this option helps me moderate things so that the actual mods have less work to do.

Yeah, I'll look into re-adding that.

tim.kahn wrote:
I just uploaded a sound to try and I must agree with klankbeeld about having to scroll to find the pack name now, the old way was much faster and handy if you knew the pack name already.

This will definitely be fixed in the coming days. It will behave like in the old UI in which you can use the keyboard to find the pack.

tim.kahn wrote:
The other thing I noticed that is small and probably just me, when the process of uploading/describing was complete and it goes back the the "manage sounds" page, the first thing to catch my eye is the sad frown face which immediately made me think something bad had happened and the upload didn't work. Of course I then read the text but possibly a bit unnecessarily startling.

Good point Maybe instead of redirecting to the "sounds pending description" tab of the manage sounds page, it could redirect to the main tab with the list of published sounds. Or I remove the sad face when there are no sounds pending description. Or I put a personalized message if you've just finished describing all sounds... I'll think about it.

Erokia wrote:
I do believe that if it is possible, can the new UI automatically translate languages into English.

This is a nice suggestion but we should think about it carefully. Personally I think that users should always have to "accept" any automatic changes that we propose to sound metadata. But yeah let's discuss this privately.

A few days ago I find out this;

I have uploaded some files

Eg
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/679541/
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/679510/

both
Samplerate 48000.0 Hz
Bitdepth 24 bit

When I look at the pages above I see this data;
Samplerate 44100.0 Hz
Bitdepth 16 bit

When I download the file it stil is the orginal as uploaded by me..

Is there something wrong? It is sinds 20 March. It is in both UI (old and new)

I'll investigate, but this should be unrelated to the new UI. It appears wrong in both UIs right?

Yep