Freesound Forums

WARNING: Rant Alert! Scroll down for the bullet points!

Well, I've about had it with the uploading interface on this site. Not only can I only describe 10 sounds at a time (my packs range from `100 - 600 per instrument, & every sound in a pack has an _identical_ description), but I also find that freesound cannot simply paste said description into the description field without adding unnecessary spaces in the text. No other applications seem to have this problem.

But that isn't the only issue. You see, after undergoing this extremely tedious cut-&-paste nightmare 4 or 5 times, I get a 404 Not Found error. To make matters worse, once (as I am told by the "all sounds have been described/added" page) this hideous process is complete, I have one last nasty surprise in store: The number of files in the pack is ALWAYS less than those in the folder I have sent them from.

I must say, it's enough trouble (though rewarding) to record an hour-long file of multitrack recordings, mix them down, cue them according to relevant velocities/quality of performance, then downsample them, edit to common length, then assemble them into a ~20 second master file, crossfade-loop each region, then compress/eq those, and split em up into individual 1-shot samples that a discerning MIDI-enabled musician can, with a little know-how & musical talent, turn into a beautiful, nuanced work of his/her own muse.

That I can deal with.

What I have become loathe to do, is deal with the many "gotchas" encountered between the editing phase on one hand, & the uploading/naming/404 error-&-now-your-pack-is-incomplete,tough-titty, freesounder, part of the experience.

That is NOT rewarding, it's maddeningly discouraging, & I have a lot less time than I used to to deal with this, especially if I cannot deliver a comprehensive sample set after all of that.

Now, I realize that my sounds are a niche market. Probably 99+ % of users are uploading, or looking for either A)single sounds, be they EDM kick drums (velocity = 127 for 10 minutes of boring sequencer music), or B)Field recordings to insert into said boring sequencer music just before the part that makes the drugs kick in that goes "whooooosh", followed by 2 seconds of silence, then: BA-GOON-BA-GA-BA-BA-GA-GA, DIGGA-DIGGA-D_D_D_D_D_D_D_DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDoom! And the Etards go, "Yay!"

For that majority, one just types in the tag & description as the "describe sounds" page loads.

If you look at comments on my sounds though, you will see that I cater more to the "OMG, my drumset is so much more realistic since I dumped the "professional" sounds I used for yours" crowd, than the "W0rd, d@T snizz-are s@mPlE B Tiz-iii6ht, IM@ riz-app @ll over d@t Biz-@tch!" crowd.

Not that there's anything wrong w/ that. But there's got to be a better way for the rest of us (okay, so it's probably just me, and those who post more than one sentence in my sounds' comments).

Yeah but still - I have a lot more stuff that I could share, but I've done literally, tens-of-thousands of cut/paste operations. I've decided that today I've done my last. Surely this can be fixed, can it not?

What's wrong in a nutshell:

-404 errors (or a "whoops, I'm broken" error) after which some of the pack's sounds are swallowed by the ether. This occurs after 30 or forty cut-and-pastes x 2 (tags, then the description). Oh, and if I find which ones are missing, & re-upload, I am told that the pack already contains a file w/ same name. I could rename it, but I'm not even going to explain why that is unsatisfactory at best.

-Inability to just describe/tag the whole damn pack, inserting that same description & tags into all sounds in that pack.

-Insertion of whole empty lines into pasted text (via Notepad FWIW). Note that this is only a problem b/c the user has no option of a "master description/tags" for all samples in a given pack.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this site rules, regardless.

lol, love this post I had to reply before I pass out.
It is very nauseating to copy, paste the description for 50 or 500 sounds at a time for just one pack.
A simple feature to allows us to copy and paste the description for all sounds in just one pack would save us alot of time.
How hard would it be to develop that feature?
I would pay to have that tool installed on this site if it made it seem worth it to do in the first place.

Idk, maybe they want us to describe each and every sound so they seem genuine but I don't feel like doing that.
Seriously?
I can't.

I could upload thousands of sounds but I won't.
Wanna know why? Because it would take forever.. FOREVER!!!!!!
Just spilling how I feel about this and i do respect the freesound people working in the back ground to keep this site running, but this is really getting old.
I mean no dis-respect, I love freesound.org and I just want it to be easier to use.
Good night and good post/

This feature request has been mentioned time and time again.

It seems like a simple implementation, and I have no idea why it has been disregarded all this time.

I myself have had my share of frustration.

I don't usually illuminate forum topics with admin, unless it is an issue with the site. But, as I class this is as great importance, I will do the favour of raising the issue, so your voice is better heard.

Word...there just isn't enough difference between, say, velocities 13 & 16...it's a damn drum, it goes "thwack!" when hit, filename tells all. It either sounds realistic when you do a pressroll & flam w/ 8x(2 roundrobin) velocity-dependant samples on a nicely dialed-in meshhead kit, or it doesn't.

Erokia wrote:
lol, love this post I had to reply before I pass out.
It is very nauseating to copy, paste the description for 50 or 500 sounds at a time for just one pack.
A simple feature to allows us to copy and paste the description for all sounds in just one pack would save us alot of time.
How hard would it be to develop that feature?
I would pay to have that tool installed on this site if it made it seem worth it to do in the first place.

Idk, maybe they want us to describe each and every sound so they seem genuine but I don't feel like doing that.
Seriously?
I can't.

I could upload thousands of sounds but I won't.
Wanna know why? Because it would take forever.. FOREVER!!!!!!
Just spilling how I feel about this and i do respect the freesound people working in the back ground to keep this site running, but this is really getting old.
I mean no dis-respect, I love freesound.org and I just want it to be easier to use.
Good night and good post/

Hello everyone,

as a member of the Freesound developers team I must say that we are aware that the current description interface is not really appropriate for describing large amounts of files, and we know that improving this interface would be a great enhancement and very useful for a lot of people.

We have been working on improvements for the description process specifically for the tagging part (and you'll see some more news soon about that). However, we have not focused yet on the case of describing MANY files. There are several ways in which this thing could be improved.

On the one side, we are just about to release a new API that will allow uploading sounds to Freesound. This will enable the possibility of someone implementing a desktop application (for example) to upload sounds with an interface that could be way more suited to your specific needs. I know that this is currently not a solution, but just to let you know that this will bring new possibilities in the future.

On the other side, we will sooner or later improve the description interface in Freesound. I can not tell you when will that happen. As some of you will know, we are a very small team of developers working non-profit for Freesound and can not spend as much time as we would like improving it. There are a lot of maintenance and optimisation tasks that consume a lot of the time we can devote to Freesound. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to start a conversation about how would you like this interface to be and which functionalities you think would be useful for you. Mockup screenshots are welcome I'm sure you have great ideas that will be helpful for us when we find some time to work on the description interface again.

Looking forward to read your posts!

Does anyone know if anything has been done to make this process easier? Just trying to upload some drum samples and just getting through the hihats and kicks took forever, and someone commented here almost 8 years ago saying they were working on it