Freesound Forums

Hi @Philip_Goddard,

Thanks for your comments. Here some comments:

I definitely need the old UI's single vertically scrolling lists, not any sort of grid arrangement, never mind how showy and 'cool' the latter might seem.

In the search page you can use the vertical list arrangement (is the one used by default), and the search page is now also used for browsing users' sounds and pack's sounds, so I guess you could stay most of the time in it? The grid layout allows to see more sounds at once, which was one of the goals of the design so there would be less scrolling needed.

And the light background of the new design makes the whole show difficult to read.

The "old" UI also has a light background, but there is less grey font color. I guess the grey text is the one you're finding difficult to read? I think the only relevant place in which it is being used which was not being used in the old UI is for the sound descriptions in grid view. The colour is supposedly chosen to have a good contrast (and has been updated a couple of times for that), but I can further experiment with it. Also, have you tried the dark mode? Maybe it works better for you.

EDIT: I tried changing the sound description font colour to black in the grid display to improve contrast.

I've switched back to the old UI, and hope that at least it will outlast me (I'm not expecting to be around here much longer anyway)!

I'm working on porting the last remaining pages to the new UI and still hope to release sometime during the summer.

Hi again!

This is another update about the status of the new UI development. I have just released some changes which mostly include:

* Make the play buttons in players always visible (following the results of the poll I initiated some days ago).
* Added modal to see the remix group of a sound that has been remixed or has remixes
* Added an advanced search option to filter sounds that have been remixed or are a remix of other sounds
* Added modal to see the "comments on my sounds". This was missing from the old UI and requested earlier in this thread. From your profile page, you can now check the comments that have been made to your sounds.
* Make improvements in the players for mobile devices so now sounds can be played with a single tap.

With this release, all the public Freesound pages have already been ported to the new interface. The non-public pages (Moderation, some API stuff) will be the next thing I'll be working on. Also I'll continue to work on fixing bugs that might appear (and hopefully fix the problem with modals and accessibility), but for the vast majority of users the new UI should be considered "complete" now.

There are many ideas that have been mentioned in this thread that did not make it for this version but we'll consider for the future. Thanks everyone for all your comments and help! The new UI is definitely a thousand times better now than what it used to be!

The next steps are to work on the non-public pages and some general optimization of the UI. I plan to make the new UI the default one at some point in July, although I don't want to make any strong promises

Sorry I prefer how it is at present to the new one. The issue with the redesign I find is the lack of contrast. It feels like it all blurs into one with a lack of clear distinction between the header area and the rest.

when i hover cursor on elements - icons keep constatly popping up ( think visually look nice, but not good idea if we look on work-expirience , because in work when you focuced on searching sounds - something constantly flashing a bit distracting and creates "garbage" in the frame )

main page needs more "views". for example - a list. list can easily include 10-15 elements and it can be more valuable than three elements with descriptions

search-page: would suggest idea to make it more compact, there is too much "free space". on full hd screen fits only 2 full results, and a title from 3. although usually when searching for "short" sounds, you also want to see them in the "most compact form"

- also it would also be better if the "playback head icon" stayed on the "last played sound" moment until you click on another sound (now it disappears after the user moves the cursor out of the waveform window)

please keep the option to return back to the old ui its way better personally

the "maps of sound" does not work properly for me. i can only click once on a marker to play a sound. on the second try it does not work anymore. Only when I reload the page it works again.

thanks for your work.

Hi Frederic and team,

Thank you very much for all your work on the new interface. In the beginning I found it difficult (old man , but after all those adjustments and your hard work I am satisfied with the result. My compliments.

I hope to enjoy freesound for a long time to come. Soon I hope to make new recordings after a long time and put them on this beautiful site.

Thanks.

frederic.font wrote:
Hi again!

This is another update about the status of the new UI development. I have just released some changes which mostly include:

* Make the play buttons in players always visible (following the results of the poll I initiated some days ago).
* Added modal to see the remix group of a sound that has been remixed or has remixes
* Added an advanced search option to filter sounds that have been remixed or are a remix of other sounds
* Added modal to see the "comments on my sounds". This was missing from the old UI and requested earlier in this thread. From your profile page, you can now check the comments that have been made to your sounds.
* Make improvements in the players for mobile devices so now sounds can be played with a single tap.

With this release, all the public Freesound pages have already been ported to the new interface. The non-public pages (Moderation, some API stuff) will be the next thing I'll be working on. Also I'll continue to work on fixing bugs that might appear (and hopefully fix the problem with modals and accessibility), but for the vast majority of users the new UI should be considered "complete" now.

There are many ideas that have been mentioned in this thread that did not make it for this version but we'll consider for the future. Thanks everyone for all your comments and help! The new UI is definitely a thousand times better now than what it used to be!

The next steps are to work on the non-public pages and some general optimization of the UI. I plan to make the new UI the default one at some point in July, although I don't want to make any strong promises

Thanks for your comments, here some more answers:

alex_l3 wrote:
main page needs more "views". for example - a list. list can easily include 10-15 elements and it can be more valuable than three elements with descriptions

The old UI only had 6 sounds in the front page (and 5 of them would only be visible when scrolling after the news section). Now we have several carousels with 3 elements visible each but with 9 more hidden in the extra pages of the carousel. All in all there are many more sounds now on the front page than before. Sure you need to use the carousel but that is the compromise we took to be able to access more sounds from the front page.

alex_l3 wrote:
search-page: would suggest idea to make it more compact, there is too much "free space". on full hd screen fits only 2 full results, and a title from 3. although usually when searching for "short" sounds, you also want to see them in the "most compact form"

You can try the "grid mode" in advanced search panel to get sound results in a grid and see more of them at once (the "grid mode" preference is remembered per user). But also I'll try to further optimize the sizes in the normal search results mode. The problem is that finding a layout that adapts well to different screen sizes and description lengths, title lengths, number of tags, etc, is not easy at all But yeah, this is something that will probably keep changing still for a while even after new UI is released.

alex_l3 wrote:
- also it would also be better if the "playback head icon" stayed on the "last played sound" moment until you click on another sound (now it disappears after the user moves the cursor out of the waveform window)

This is kind of the behaviour for mobile devices that don't have cursor events (and therefore there is no "mouse" to move out of the waveform), but in desktop devices the playback bar will only remain visible as long as the sound is playing (so you can quickly see which sounds are being played). I think this works quite nicely, what would you gain by keeping the playback bar of the last sound played visible?

@Garuda1982: i fixed the map issue, thanks for reporting!

@klankbeeld: Thanks a lot for your comment, I really appreciate it! Indeed the new UI development is requiring a lot of work on my side, and it is not being easy at times. Of course I understand that most messages here will be to point out the things that don't work or users dislike, but it is also very nice to read positive and encouraging messages like these

Really like the UI refresh!

One request is a download button for each sound in the list when you search. Having to open a new page to download each sound is cumbersome.

Otherwise love the direction!

Hi,

This message is for the freesound team. I tried your new interface today and now, I can add bookmark with voice over on my iPod touch, I'm very glad because I don't need my pc now to use freesound correctly. Is it the new interface is again in process or you will change it definitly, thanks very much!

Describing sounds is now much more time-consuming. The amount of visual clutter and scrolling are greatly increased so it's harder to precisely locate the elements you need to work on and that process always takes longer. Each sound takes over a page of vertical space, the sound preview accounts for nearly a third of that, and you can't copy paste tags from one sound to another, but rather have to type them all out somewhere else and THEN paste them in.

EDIT: You also can't see whether a sound has remixes on the user page or in the search results. When the icon is there, it's the same color as everything else, so it might as well be invisible.

ladymanproduction wrote:
One request is a download button for each sound in the list when you search. Having to open a new page to download each sound is cumbersome.

Thanks for your comment. Making users go to the sound page makes it harder to download sounds, but this is intentional. By making users navigate to the sound page, we increase the "exposure" that users have to the license and authorship information for the sound (e.g., the sound URL includes the author's username and of course the sound page makes all that information more visible than the small sound display).

Telac166 wrote:
I tried your new interface today and now, I can add bookmark with voice over on my iPod touch, I'm very glad because I don't need my pc now to use freesound correctly. Is it the new interface is again in process or you will change it definitly, thanks very much!

Thanks for your comments and your help testing Freesound accessibility. This week I've been doing some accessibility improvements and I'm happy to read that modals are now accessible. There are still things pending in terms of accessibility, but most of Freesound should be accessible now. The new UI will replace the old one at some point during summer, hopefully in July, but I can't guarantee anything.

strangehorizon wrote:
Describing sounds is now much more time-consuming. The amount of visual clutter and scrolling are greatly increased so it's harder to precisely locate the elements you need to work on and that process always takes longer. Each sound takes over a page of vertical space, the sound preview accounts for nearly a third of that, and you can't copy paste tags from one sound to another, but rather have to type them all out somewhere else and THEN paste them in.

Thanks again for continuing to provide feedback. Yeah I agree that the description/editing page now takes more space than before and it could be made more compact. I'll look into improving the compactness. Also it has new features like the sources section (before it was on a different page) and the ability to edit multiple files at once. You should be able to copy/paste tags from one sound to another using standard copy/paste functions (even if tags are formatted, it should work). Also I'm planning to add buttons to copy form fields from one sound to the others (as we discussed earlier in this thread), but I don't think this will make it to the first release.

strangehorizon wrote:
EDIT: You also can't see whether a sound has remixes on the user page or in the search results. When the icon is there, it's the same color as everything else, so it might as well be invisible.

I'm not sure I understand that one. You should be able to see the "remix" icon next to the similarity and bookmark buttons in the different kinds of players. So if you see similarity/bookmark buttons you should also see the remix button (unless there is a bug). Is it possible that in some cases you search for remixed sounds and some sounds do not show the remix icon at all, but this should only happen temporarily and is due to the different rates at which the "remix trees" and the search engine are updated when sound information changes or when new sounds are added.

BTW, @strangehorizon: have you ever tried to use the "bulk description" method in which you provide the descriptions of multiple sounds using a CSV/XLS file? I think this is useful for pro users like you, maybe you can give it a try. See more info here: https://freesound.org/help/faq/#i-have-many-sounds-to-upload-is-there-a-way-to-describe-many-sounds-in-bulk

Yeah I agree that the description/editing page now takes more space than before and it could be made more compact.

I think the only people who would benefit from the sound preview are people uploading batches (ie, power users who just made the stuff they're uploading and already know what they're describing). I would make both the sound preview and the geotag section collapsible into the height of a line of text, and have them be in that state by default.

I'm not sure I understand that one. You should be able to see the "remix" icon

Yes, but it used to be blue and that stood out visually. Now it looks like any other text. In fact, it renders as a text glyph, so those who have antialiasing/visual effects turned off (like myself) can hardly tell what it is.
Also, I only see it on an individual sound's page, not on any list entry referencing the sound.

have you ever tried to use the "bulk description" method in which you provide the descriptions of multiple sounds using a CSV/XLS file?

I have not, because to use it, I would have to download spreadsheet software, write all the info down in a dense format, upload it, make sure it works, and then clean up the file on my PC. Then I have to create another file and run the software again every time I want to do this. So if I record 50 different hits on a hi-hat, I have to copy/paste or duplicate lines in the CSV/XLS file 49 times, make sure the right amount of lines is there and that they reference each file, etc. This route also involves me having to hand-write every filename and check it for accuracy before the file I wrote will work, which sucks.
Being able to batch-describe sounds online, from a single set of text fields, without having to muck about with external software or files, would be ideal.

A while ago I wrote this tool to (hopefully) make the csv creation a little easier; you'll still have to create a temp file for the common description, but at least you won't need any spreadsheet software.

https://github.com/P-D-E/Bulker

It doesn't seem like there's a way to un-bookmark a sound on the sound's page itself. You have to try and remember the title, go back to the bookmark collection page, then remove it there. If we can add a sound to a bookmark collection from the sound's page, why can't we also remove it?

Adding a “remove bookmark” button is a good suggestion, I’ll add it to the list. If a sound is a added to multiple bookmark categories though, then the button would remove it from all categories. Or maybe the option should only be enabled if sound is in a single category (or in “no category”).

apologies but, are you unable to bookmark songs while browsing the search results anymore? if you still can then please provide instructions

You should be able to bookmark sounds clicking on the "bookmark" button that appears when hovering a sound image. This will show a "bookmark sound modal". @johndoe58 was referring to the fact that, when a sound is already bookmarked, you can not "unbookmark" it through the "bookmark sound modal" and you need to go to your "bookmarks" page to do so.

@strangehorizon: I have made the sound players hidden by default in the description/edit pages when you are describing/editing more than one sound at the same time. Also I made a couple of small fixes to improve spacing. About the remix buttons, they only appear when sounds have remixes or are a remix of other sounds, which does not happen that often. Nevertheless, there seems to be an issue with that and I have to double check it because now I'm also not seeing the buttons.

The tag suggestion dropdown menu appears and hides the description field while you're typing in it. It also happens any time you copy/paste to or from any text field on this page. Very annoying. The dynamic suggestions can also really cause a lot of browser lag.