Freesound Forums

First impression: Relatively intuitive. Pretty fast. I hate that 50% of my screen width (PC) is empty and wasted space. I will never understand why "modern" websites keep doing this. Sound playback of the preview seems much less broken than before. A little bit too much white for my taste.

A few issues I found so far:

- The sound page of a sound under CC BY-NC displays the license incorrectly as "Noncommercial" while omitting the word "Attribution". Also, only the NonCommercial icon is shown but not the Attribution icon . This is dangerous misinformation and leads users into a legal trap into believing that attribution is not required although it is! This is a serious and should be treated as a critical bug.
Although the small text mentions attribution, that's no excuse because I can guarantee you people WILL mess this up because the UI sends mixed messages. You should NOT arbitrarily change the license names of CC licenses to whatever you see fit. Either use the long name correctly (in this case: "Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0" or the abbreviation (CC BY-NC 4.0). Also, add the Attribution icon. Basically, just use the official wording and icon usage of Creative Commons and just stick to standard usage to minimize confusion. PLEASE fix this before release.

Other complaints:

- Disappointingly, the search feature still doesn't have a one-click option to only display sounds compatible with free culture / free software values (which currently translates to CC0 and CC BY). To get a full list of free/libre sounds, I still have to awkwardly do two searches: CC0, then CC BY, both separately. As I am a free software zealot myself, this is what has frustrated me in Freesound forever
- The licensing / free software status of the JavaScript code on this website is unclear. Please read The JavaScript Trap < https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html > and Setting your JavaScript free < https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.html >
- A lot of light gray font is used on a white background. This makes the text unneccessarily hard to read sometimes. I suggest to greatly reduce the use of gray text.
- I'm not a fan of tags becoming harder to read the further down you go. Please just use the same font color for all of them
- Very very minor but I recommend to shorten "Creative Commons 0" to just "CC0". That's the official name anyway

Typos:

- Filesize → File size
- Samplerate → Sample rate
- Bitdepth → Bit depth
- Noncommercial → NonCommercial

Hello. I want to report some issues I found.

1. On the login screen, in dark mode, the email input box is white when deselected, and the text stays white. This makes it unreadable.
2. In the page selector at the bottom of search results, when hovering in the small area around each number, it registers as clickable and the mouse pointer changes. But this area is irresponsive, and you can only click directly on each number to select the page.

SDFISDFJOSDFSDF wrote:
First impression: Relatively intuitive. Pretty fast. I hate that 50% of my screen width (PC) is empty and wasted space. I will never understand why "modern" websites keep doing this. Sound playback of the preview seems much less broken than before. A little bit too much white for my taste.

Websites are increasingly being designed for phones operating in portrait mode. But there's a reason we don't print books on receipt paper.

frederic.font wrote:

If you refer to the sounds which are currently displayed in "rows" in, e.g., the front page I'm afraid not (or at least not in the near future). The only way I could see this working without being too disruptive with the design would be to keep the idea of the carousels but display one sound per "page" instead of the 2 or 3 sounds per page that we use currently (depending on page's width). In the 1 sound per page mode I could try and use the display mode used in search results so you see more information. Nevertheless that'd mean less sounds are immediately visible, and the idea of usig the horizontal display was precisely to be able to see and play more sounds on the screen. If we ever go into that direction that'd be something to configure in account preferences.

I mean the sounds on the user pages. Those pages are the ones the serious users are going to be combing through once they find a creator they like.

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for the most recent feedback! Answering some comments:

SDFISDFJOSDFSDF wrote:
The sound page of a sound under CC BY-NC displays the license incorrectly as "Noncommercial" while omitting the word "Attribution". Also, only the NonCommercial icon is shown but not the Attribution icon . This is dangerous misinformation and leads users into a legal trap into believing that attribution is not required although it is! This is a serious and should be treated as a critical bug.

This is a good point. I'll update the icons/license name so it is more official. Attribution icon was omitted because there's no "NC" without "BY" license and in this way all license would have an icon taking the same width. For the same reason the name was shortened, but I understand how this could be confusing.

SDFISDFJOSDFSDF wrote:
Disappointingly, the search feature still doesn't have a one-click option to only display sounds compatible with free culture / free software values

Thanks for the suggestion. This was already pointed out by other users and we already decided we'll add an option for this as part of the new UI release. I'm thinking how to do it properly because it breaks a bit our filtering pattern, but we'll add this feature somehow. One idea is to have a "fifth" license filter option which is "All free culture compatible", but it can be a bit confusing because it is not one single license. Another idea would be to add a checkbox in the advanced search. I'll think about it.

SDFISDFJOSDFSDF wrote:
A lot of light gray font is used on a white background

I already made the grey text darker to improve contrast, but I still have pending a number of improvements suggested by the designer to further improve that. This is going to change in the following weeks.

SDFISDFJOSDFSDF wrote:
I'm not a fan of tags becoming harder to read the further down you go. Please just use the same font color for all of them

This is to represent their least relevance with respect to the query or other selected tags. I already increased the minimum opacity a little bit, but I can't do it more without losing the relevance information. In the old UI this was achieved with size, but here the size change would not work that well. Maybe it will improve a bit with the improved contrast of the gray text.

SDFISDFJOSDFSDF wrote:
- The licensing / free software status of the JavaScript code on this website is unclear.

Thanks for the suggestion, I see the room for improvement here. I think we already have a ticket opened to improve that. We'll make it eventually but it is not top priority right now.

Anjoom wrote:
1. On the login screen, in dark mode, the email input box is white when deselected, and the text stays white. This makes it unreadable.
2. In the page selector at the bottom of search results, when hovering in the small area around each number, it registers as clickable and the mouse pointer changes. But this area is irresponsive, and you can only click directly on each number to select the page.

Will fix those, thanks!

strangehorizon wrote:
I mean the sounds on the user pages. Those pages are the ones the serious users are going to be combing through once they find a creator they like.

I'll think about that. However what you see in the profile is only a "preview" of the latest sounds. Once you click on "see all sounds" then you get the full search interface with the list view and all the filtering and sorting options. This was actually not possible with the old UI, so you get much more options now.

OK, I've tried that. I now have two more suggestions:

1. The filter categories (type, samplerate, etc.) switched from being on the right side to the left side. I guess this new layout is better for right-handed users since it keeps those elements away from their right thumb/fingertip when they're using a phone, but for me, it's a really jarring change.

2. The categories could be collapsible, and those settings could be tied to the user account. Some of us are never going to care about bit depth or sample rate because we have the tools to just change those things anyway.

And feedback:
The way sounds are sorted brings both positive and negative changes. As a variety creator, I can appreciate how my user page now shows a lot of varied sounds from different packs. However, it doesn't do what it says (show all sounds). It seems there is in fact no setting that shows all sounds, so I'll have to quit putting anything in packs if I want them all to show up as members of one continuous chronological list.
Now, users are only going to see the most recent sound of a pack/sorting category, and will have to dig more to see anything else. Given the increasingly young age and short attention span of the users, this effectively means that the vast majority of creators' work is going to go unnoticed.
EDIT: Okay, I found the "Group sounds by pack" search option, and I think it should be off by default.

Basically, things have gotten better for mobile users and worse for PC users, which is irritating because PC users are making the majority of the contributions and doing the majority of the work.

First of all, thanks for your continuous feedback @strangehorizon! I really appreciate that you take the time to share your thoughts even if you're not very happy with the new UI. I truly believe that after some iteration we can improve many things and I hope that these improvements in combination with you getting used to the UI will make your Freesound experience great again.

strangehorizon wrote:
2. The categories could be collapsible, and those settings could be tied to the user account. Some of us are never going to care about bit depth or sample rate because we have the tools to just change those things anyway.

This is an interesting idea, although I'm not sure many people would be willing to customise their "filters bar". Nevertheless this is something that we can add to our list of future ideas and can get picked up at some point (but surely not for the first UI release).

strangehorizon wrote:
EDIT: Okay, I found the "Group sounds by pack" search option, and I think it should be off by default.

Yeah this sounds like a reasonable suggestion. I think that someone else also mentioned that at some point. It makes sense to make "Group sounds by pack" disabled by default when clicking "see all sounds". For the "normal" search though, I think it makes sense to keep "Group sounds by pack" enabled by default.

strangehorizon wrote:
Now, users are only going to see the most recent sound of a pack/sorting category, and will have to dig more to see anything else.

Related to that, @Erokia suggested the idea of adding a "featured sounds/packs" section in the profile before the "latest sounds/packs". This would allow creators to show a hand picked list of sounds/packs. I think this is a great idea and I have added it to our ideas for the (hopefully) near future, but it won't be there for the first "final" release of the new UI.

strangehorizon wrote:
Basically, things have gotten better for mobile users and worse for PC users, which is irritating because PC users are making the majority of the contributions and doing the majority of the work.

Believe it or not, it has never been the intention to optimise for mobile. We surely wanted to make it a bit better that what it currently was (for mobile), but nothing more. The experience of using Freesound from desktop is the priority for us and what we really want to support. Mobile support is just a "side effect" of the newer technology we use, which allows us to define layouts that adapt better to small screen sizes, but we have very little efforts in optimising browsing for mobile browsing.

You can call me Zeph.

This site helps me accomplish my chosen mission: To provide interesting and quality creative resources for all. Freesound has great potential to be a premier, enduring source of free and useful materials for humanity and I want to see this realized. I want to see more people choosing to create things instead of merely consuming them. If resources are not free, or are inconvenient to examine and obtain, that will be another limiter for those potential creators. They already find enough reasons to doubt themselves and turn away from creative endeavors. We need to cure and prevent that wherever we can.

I spend a lot of hours staring at this site and uploading things to it. Naturally, this leads me to notice every little thing that costs time/energy or creates strain. Something that seems inconsequential now might cost someone hours of wasted time down the line. That's the source of, and reason for, my criticism. If you get a rock in your shoe, you can stand to walk on it for a while, but eventually the rock is going to occupy your mind to such an extent that you have to do something about it.

The less clicking, scrolling and searching the user has to do, the less requests their browser has to send to your server. The current new UI model runs somewhat counter to this. If I upload 20 snare hit variations, that data will take up a good 3-4 screen heights and, because descriptions are required, the same text will be repeated over and over. This incentivizes users to put everything in small packs, but if I do that, anyone who wants to build a sound library from my material will have to spend a lot of time sifting through my packs and downloading them all. There's a maximum useful density to any organization scheme and that's why I tend to browse user pages directly in the old UI's list view.

The option of sorting a user's uploads or a pack's contents by filename would somewhat mitigate things. For instance, I record good creaking wooden doors when I find them. So I might upload "creak 1" on March 1st, "creak 2" on April 1st, and so on. If we can sort by filename then we can see them all together, and compare them, and associate them, without having to dig too much or deal with all the other files uploaded between Mar 1 and Apr 1.

frederic.font wrote:
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.

Awesome! I just checked this out and I love it! Also I read your reply and consideration of "Featured Sounds" I think thats a really good idea too

Appreciate the efforts on the new look.

A quick notes of feedback.

In a search results page, I would find it helpful to be able to quickly bounce around sounds. That is, right now if I play a sound, then hit play on another sound further down the page, two sounds play simultaneously. It would be much more helpful and fast for my workflow if when I hit play on a secondary sound source that it would choke/stop the first and only play the second.

Thanks.

Hi Ampersanders0n,

Thanks for your message. You can already do that by either doing “alt+click” on players’ play buttons, or by disabling “simultaneous sound playback” in your profile settings.

I didn't like the dark mode. That's fine though cause I found out I could switch to light mode. Only I had troubles finding where to do that, so it took me a bit longer.

Dear friends, My name is Diane, and I am blind. I use an iPhone 3 se with Voiceover on Freesound. The accessability is much better than it used to be. Thanks for putting headings for each sound. Now I can just scroll through them using my rotor on headings. The play button is now showing again, so that's great two. However I can't get the similar sounds, or the book mark buttons to work. Please can you try this out on an iPhone using Voiceover. Thanks

Hi everyone,

I love this new interface of freesound but I encountered a problem with buttons play pause or loop with my screen readers Jaws or Nvda on my pc, the synthetizer don't tell me the buttons but my braille display, yes. Also, impossible to bookmark a sound when my screen reader is active but I think this problem can be resolved? Anyway, thanks to frederic and freesound team for the new interface, work very well on my apple device! Question, is it the community can help for blind users for accessibility of this new interface?

Thank you for making a new UI, the old one was getting, well, old.

In what world does that matter? The old UI lasted this long because it's good. I still hate the new one.

After this impressively solid "argumentation", I am of the opinion that it is high time to finally raze St. Peter's Basilica, this gerontological wall, Sydney Opera, this architectural eyesore as well as the Eiffel Tower, this rusting old metal scaffolding that causes pain to the juvenile eye, to the ground.

Everything stone old, who can stand that? It's time for something new - it really doesn't matter what it looks like, it's not about such aesthetic trifles, what else are we supposed to do? - something NEW! Finally, the technical modernity will be able to take over these now so Methuselah-like, technically backwoods absolute desolateness... finally, finally!

Sorry, but yes, it's polemical, and it should be!

Seelengold

LMAO Guys, I meant old as in it was getting tiresome. I am all about retro 90s web but the freesound website was just outdated in a non cool way. The new one can be improved but still more pleasant imo fam tbh.

My one suggestion would be to make the spectral view the default one for sounds. Looks way more fresh and interesting than the tired ass soundwave, which is just old as well.

I'd be ashamed to say I worked 5 months on it, let alone 5 years.

I see the way things are going and the way newer users "think" so this is where I stop posting. I'll make a decent attempt at fixing the new UI with some code-injecting browser extension. I'll edit this post if it's successful...

Hi everyone,

Some more comments:

saorenjoyer wrote:
My one suggestion would be to make the spectral view the default one for sounds. Looks way more fresh and interesting than the tired ass soundwave, which is just old as well.

This is something users can configure and make spectral view the default (see the account settings page). I use spectral view by default and I think it is definitely much better than the waveform. But maybe hard to understand and too unfamiliar for non-sound experts.

strangehorizon wrote:
I'll make a decent attempt at fixing the new UI with some code-injecting browser extension.

I'll be happy to review this code and see what can be incorporated officially. You've made many suggestions for the new UI that have been listened to and also many of them actually implemented. We're always happy to listen to ideas that can make Freesound better.

strangehorizon wrote:
The old UI lasted this long because it's good

Well, this is only partially true. We wanted to re-structure the UI for a long time, but we don't have many resources and have been forced to do it very slowly. That is why it took so long. Also, when we introduced the "old" UI, some users were complaining in similar ways as some are doing now. I've already mentioned that in previous posts, but our intention with the new UI is to make Freesound better, more usable and to prepare it for the future, not just to give it a "fresh" look because this is a "cool" thing to do.

strangehorizon wrote:
I'd be ashamed to say I worked 5 months on it, let alone 5 years.

I'm sorry Zeph but I'm finding this comment too disrespectful. This is not your first harsh comment, but maybe the harshest of them so far. I'm fine with negative feedback, we respect and consider all opinions, and negative feedback helps us improving the site. I've shown that clearly in my conversations with you and the many suggestions we have incorporated from your comments. But I would expect you to treat us with the same respect we are treating you and everyone else.

@foodnmusic and @Tealc166: thanks for your suggestions regarding accessibility. We'll work on improving these aspects for the new UI and I'll indeed request for accessibility feedback once we start spending more time with it. The issues with the similar sounds and bookmark panels are known and will be fixed soon.

Also I'd like to mention that we've been releasing updates in the new UI, many of them as a result of the conversations in this thread, including the new "Free cultural works" license filtering option, more information directly visible in small sound/pack players, the ability to rate sounds directly in small players, and many others.