Freesound Forums

An idea to make the pack display look like the other displays and also streamline it a bit:

Thanks for the suggestion. The "small" icons are displayed in the first line if the pack name is short enough, or in the second line if the name is long. This is the same for the sounds. However I can see how in the packs case this can sometimes cause problems because next to the username we already have the "x sounds" bit. We would have a similar problem if I moved the "x sounds" bit next to the title. Instead what I just did (after reading your suggestion), is to use an icon for the "x sounds" bit just like for the other things. This way it is more coherent with sound displays and it looks good. I already deployed the change but it will take some time for it to be applied to all packs.

About the description: I initially showed nothing when there is no description, but then it does not look nice when other packs have description because there is extra unused white space (specially relevant in the grid display). Therefore I decided to add this text also hoping that this would motivate pack creators to add descriptions (which would be the ideal situation).

Thanks again!

frederic.font wrote:

Philip_Goddard wrote:
A lot of this comes down to the fact that I provide detailed notes with each upload, and this usually involves referring to other recordings of mine, which I need to look up. It's usually quite a lot of work as it is.

With the new UI you can search and filter your own sounds, that might help finding the sounds you look for without having to scroll that much. This was not possible with the old UI so maybe this helps. Also, if you find the description interface not good for your uploading workflow, you might want to try using the "bulk describe" feature which will allow you to describe sounds using a spreadsheet editor (like Excel). Maybe that works for you. Here's information about how to use that feature: https://freesound.org/help/faq/#i-have-many-sounds-to-upload-is-there-a-way-to-describe-many-sounds-in-bulk

Thanks for the heads-up about the filtering, for I hadn't properly noticed that. Yes, that is at least potentially an improvement on all the scrolling I had to do before, and does point to just possibly being able sensibly to use the system. However, I did a quick couple of test filter searches within my own uploads, and found that the results still come out in grid format. Not only that, but that format, as many others have commented, results in over-abbreviated title and beginning of description, which quite a bit negates the point of doing a filter / search operation; I do need to be able to identify search results quickly, as-presented, and currently I can do so only for a minority of the grid-list items.

If there are only a few results from a filter query, then, yes, I can find some things more quickly than I could before — but still I often have to ctl-click on an item to open the respective page (slow!) to see whether it is the one I'm looking for.

Please note that there's a tolerable workaround solution to that, which ought to be easily implemented — to enable a mouse-hover tooltip to display the respective full title, and the same for description (say full first couple of lines). Or indeed a combined tooltip for both could be quicker. Obviously it would need to be highly responsive (minimal delay), otherwise that would be another workflow hindrance.

Still, on the basis of a small foothold, as it were, I now intend to do a couple of test uploads so I can see whether the filtering facility tips the balance in favour of my continuing uploading to FS. That would depend, though, on the aforementioned tooltips being implemented at least very soon. Those uploads won't be immediate, because the Nature-Symphonies I'm currently working on can't be completed for a while yet, so, working methodically through my field recordings collection, my next upload would be from a Nature Symphony that I can complete at this stage. Maybe some days ahead…

On another point, there's a formatting bug on my 'person' page, in that the text introducing me and my work is all centre-aligned, and there's no way for me to correct that, as relevant HTML tags aren't allowed there.

frederic.font wrote:
I have an update about that . Many of you asked to have the downloads and comments count in the grid sound display, not only in this thread but also in other threads and during the public beta. For that reason I decided to give it another go and I found a way to add the information in the displays which I think looks good. So yes, now you'll see number of downloads and comments in the manage sounds page as well (note that it might take some hours until this update is applied to all sounds).

Basically what I've don is to add this information next to the other icons which were already present (geotag, pack, license...). If the sound has no downloads or comments, then the icons for downloads/comments are not shown (the same applies to the other icons). The only issue is when a sound has many downloads and many comments and also has a pack and geotag (...), in that case many icons appear and it might feel a bit cluttered, but not as bad as I thought it would be. And in any case for the average sound I think it looks quite good.

Agreed with the remark about the center-aligned profile text. I know you probably want to avoid (div) tags since they can break a page. So, I propose returning to left-aligned text but allowing the (center) tag.

I did try using (p style="text-align:right") but it got reverted to (p).

I also propose making the profile area as wide as the horizontal dividers. If the rest of the page can be that wide, it only makes sense.

Hi again, more updates:

• A mouse hover tooltip is now used to show longer versions of the descriptions when these do not fit in sound displays. This was already the case for the title, but now I added it for the description as @Philip_Goddard suggested.
• User about text is now left-justified by default. Also I added support for the property "align" in "p" tags so you can do p align="center" for example (or p align="justify"). Thanks for the suggestion @strangehorizon.

Also @Philip_Goddard, I see you are referring to the search options in the manage sounds page. These are somewhat limited and will only show sounds in the grid mode. I was referring to the search and filtering options in your sounds' list: https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/. This might be more useful, it uses the vertical list and you see more of sound descriptions (and also you have the new tooltip).

Great improvements! Thank you, this helps me present and curate material, threads, etc. on my profile.

I got another idea just now, for adding sound sources: Allow the search string to encode them all at once, so you could search for a string like "444444,555555,666666,777777", and have all four of them returned at once. This would take a lot of the pain out of creating remix groups since you could just write down the sounds' IDs one time and then put them into one field.

Thanks @strangehorizon. To clarify the sound sources suggestion, the use case you want to address is that of having to set the same sources to a group of sounds?

I want to set a group of sounds as sources for one remix. At present, if I use 10 items in a remix, I have to review my own downloads page to get the sound IDs, transcribe them to notepad, then copy paste them into the search dialog one at a time. I have to run 10 separate searches to find sounds for which I already have the IDs.

Right, you can already do that, but you'll need to separate sound IDs with spaces. So if you set a query like XXX YYY ZZZ the first results returned will be those with the corresponding IDs. There will be also other results matching the query, but the first ones should be the ones that match the ID.

frederic.font wrote:
Hi again, more updates:

• A mouse hover tooltip is now used to show longer versions of the descriptions when these do not fit in sound displays. This was already the case for the title, but now I added it for the description as @Philip_Goddard suggested.
• User about text is now left-justified by default. Also I added support for the property "align" in "p" tags so you can do p align="center" for example (or p align="justify"). Thanks for the suggestion @strangehorizon.

Also @Philip_Goddard, I see you are referring to the search options in the manage sounds page. These are somewhat limited and will only show sounds in the grid mode. I was referring to the search and filtering options in your sounds' list: https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/. This might be more useful, it uses the vertical list and you see more of sound descriptions (and also you have the new tooltip).

Thank you Frederic for making the particular improvements, including correcting the text alignment in user profile. and doing your best to clarify further — and I appreciate your patience!

Actually, looking more carefully at the difference between the main list of my recordings and the Manage Sounds list, it appears that the former is usable for management of my material, while the latter facility appears to be where one needs to go for deleting items.

But for whatever purpose, a mouse-hover tooltip for title and first two lines of description would make the Manage Sounds facility much more usable, considering the over-truncation of those elements in each entry in the grid display. If I'm wanting to remove an item, I'd still need to find it quickly, without hassle, and tooltips are essential there, seeing that apparently we're stuck with the grid display there.

I've just checked the grid display of some of my sounds below my profile text. I see that in that location the grid items have a generous tooltip for displaying a good chunk of long descriptions (good!), but those items could still much benefit from a tooltip for full title as well, which they don't have at the moment.

Thanks again for all your work!

Thanks again to Frederic for your hard work! And to Strangehorizon for helpful suggestions for improvement.

Philip_Goddard wrote:
But for whatever purpose, a mouse-hover tooltip for title and first two lines of description would make the Manage Sounds facility much more usable, considering the over-truncation of those elements in each entry in the grid display. If I'm wanting to remove an item, I'd still need to find it quickly, without hassle, and tooltips are essential there, seeing that apparently we're stuck with the grid display there.

I've just checked the grid display of some of my sounds below my profile text. I see that in that location the grid items have a generous tooltip for displaying a good chunk of long descriptions (good!), but those items could still much benefit from a tooltip for full title as well, which they don't have at the moment.

The tooltips should be there for title and description in both the search page and the manage sounds page (and any other place where there are sounds displayed and the title/description does not fit in the provided space). Maybe when you checked it was not the case because of cache reasons, but it should now be working as expected.

Everyone's profile looks squished now as if it were printed on receipt paper. I was able to use some divider images to extend my profile out a few hundred pixels, but it's still narrow compared to the rest of the page.

Please feel free to reference Timbre's page (since it has a lot of text) and my own (since it has images that are meant to be as wide as the horizontal dividers) when calibrating the width.

frederic.font wrote:

The tooltips should be there for title and description in both the search page and the manage sounds page (and any other place where there are sounds displayed and the title/description does not fit in the provided space). Maybe when you checked it was not the case because of cache reasons, but it should now be working as expected.

Thank you Frederic.

Yes, there are tooltips working for a good chunk of description, but nothing for the titles. I not only did a Ctl-R refresh but also tried loading a relevant page in Chrome (Firefox is my normal browser), and with uBlock Origin disabled, and nowhere except on the main search results list did the title tooltips appear. Clearly this isn't a cache issue, because I've not at all recently, if ever, loaded a FS page in Chrome.

At least I do get an impression that we're 'getting there' with regard to making list entries as useful as possible.

When editing a pack, I can see every item in it, as it loads them all. This makes it quite laggy to edit the descriptions of larger packs. Maybe have it only load the first 12, like it does when you view a pack (or 15, for the sake of consistency across user pages, search pages and packs alike).

I'm deploying fix for the profiles.

About pack editing, it is already on the list to optimize it for large packs as I know the pages are slow and harder to use.

And about the tooltips, that is strange because I can see them everywhere. Maybe @Philip_Goddard can you share the URL in which you're not seeing the tooltips?

Great! I still wish profiles were wider but at least this last change prevents the earlier left-justification idea from breaking anyone's page.

Here's a minor one: After the title at the top of a forum post, render the arrows/page selector buttons, so people can go through pages from the top instead of having to scroll or hit End to get to the bottom to find those links every time.

EDIT: Now that I look again, the buttons should probably go under the line that contains the "thread started on X, latest reply by Y" part. Somewhere around there.

frederic.font wrote:
I'm deploying fix for the profiles.

…

And about the tooltips, that is strange because I can see them everywhere. Maybe @Philip_Goddard can you share the URL in which you're not seeing the tooltips?

That is strange indeed! Here are some URLs for pages where I get no tooltips for the truncated titles (even with pointer hovered on title for 5+ seconds), while the description tooltips do appear, though with up to a second's lag. I tried also in Edge browser, which I virtually never use. The results are the same every time. As I've remarked, the title tooltips do appear just fine on the main search listing (in non-grid mode).

https://freesound.org/

https://freesound.org/home/sounds/manage/published/

https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/

https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/packs/39136/

Let's see if some other users are experiencing this, and maybe we could find some common factor between those of us affected by this issue.

Most of the "edit text" widgets used to be resizable. Edit forum post, edit sound description, etc. Now they are a static size, so writing and proofreading a long post involves a lot of scrolling.