Freesound Forums

I think it would help with the overall quality of FreeSound if there were a button on the sound page to report it for being useless or of exceedingly low quality.

I think that runs contrary to the idea of Freesound being a site for "all" sound. In addition to all the wonderful, inspiring recordings, I also quite enjoy the fact that anyone can mumble something into their cellphone recorder and post it for all to hear just as freely.

Indeed, low-quality is a quality to. I love them. It inpires me to do strange recordings.

There is another reason why this will not happen.
Freesound is used by university students and researchers. For anyone developing a program to 'clean up' sounds (for example, extracting conversations from a noisy background) that is precisely the kind of sounds they will be looking for!
So we actually need the low quality recordings too.

I also disagree because furthermore, some people make intentionally bad sounds to fit with their "lo-fi" style.

What would be the point anyway? It's so subjective that your opinion on a "useless" sound could be seen as entirely unreasonable by another. I would not trust you or anyone with a report for removal button for that reason, and it would most certainly be abused.

Consider the fact that there are sounds rated 1 star a hundred times over; obviously, no one wants it. At the very least, an option to hide these would be helpful.
And honestly, do the owners of this site even come here anymore?

Don't worry, we ("the creators") visit these pages once in a while

Both AlienXXX and Headphaze are both moderators on this site: their input is just as valuable as ours.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder. We've had requests similar to these in the past. I think Frederic was at some point doing some research around this, I have no idea what the outcome was. I'll point him here.

- bram

Honestly, it just gets old wading through twenty blown-out clips of little kids making bullet noises with their mouths to find the one that actually sounds good.

I agree with current policy. I do understand the frustration of ploughing through 304 pages of samples however. A compromise might be to encourage the use of "lo-fi" or "hi-fi" tags, but that is a matter of judgement and far from fool-proof. Having the moderator of the sample apply the tag would probably be most useful to improve the search experience but would inevitably give offense to some uploaders. From my experience the most useful way to improve searches would be to have tags which are arguably misleading or unjustifiable removed. But again this would cause offense to some uploaders who are proud of their efforts, and I would rather be a member of a happy family than an "efficient" family!

Another improvement would be for Mod. to correct misspelled tags.

I mention these ideas to encourage discussion, not because I endorse them.

Wibby, big fan of universal tolerance.

Ethanicus wrote:
Honestly, it just gets old wading through twenty blown-out clips of little kids making bullet noises with their mouths to find the one that actually sounds good.

I totally get where you're coming from. This didn't happen as much a while back when search results were ordered by most downloaded first, the popular (often good) stuff was usually piled up at the beginning, but this actually turned out to be the wrong way of approaching the initial results which is why it was changed and introduced a new algorithm.

An immediate solution for you would be to change the sort order for results:

http://i57.tinypic.com/iokxgn.png

This will give you a much more tailored experience when searching.

I do believe in fact the results can be improved upon. It's a legitimate endeavour which as Bram said, has been considered. We should put this back on our radar.

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strangely_gnarled wrote:

Another improvement would be for Mod. to correct misspelled tags.

Actually coming to think of it I rarely see misspelled tags. But If I saw an error in the tagging I would flag it with the user whilst moderating the sound, and I'm sure the others would do the same.

Ethanicus wrote:
Honestly, it just gets old wading through twenty blown-out clips of little kids making bullet noises with their mouths to find the one that actually sounds good.

For example, I have seen a friend, actually also a Freesounder, (who is far more talented than me) create amazing dance rhythms using an old music program and samples of little shitty beeps and blops that I would have dismissed as rubish...

I have also told this story before here in the forums. I was making a collaboration music piece with a friend. We decided to use sounds he would record at work. He did not have a recorder, so he used his iphone.
The sounds were some interesting chain rattles and metal klangs. I was putting the mix together and I did some creative filters sweeps on his sounds, synced to the song tempo. All was going we were doing some final tweaks. We said to one another "yeah, the recorded sounds are cool, but they are quite noisy." He had this sound cleaning/restauration software and offered to clean them up.
He sent me the new versions and they were pristine: all the bacground noise was gone.
I replaced the old sounds with the new, rendered the piece and sent it over.
When I was listening to it afterwards, it sounded wrong. Lifeless.
I went back to the project to figure out what went wrong. Did I mute a channel somehow? Switch off an effect accidentally? I realized it was the filtered parts. Filter automation was still on. Resonance had not changed... What could it be?
My friend emailed me back around the same time, appologetic: "You know... I actually liked it better as it was..."

Shortly after, I figured it out: the filter sweeps were picking up not just on the main sound but also on the noisy background. Cleaning the sounds up removed that effect, and what sounded like a nice interesting rhythmic part was now mundane and pretty lifeless.

I am not saying a "good sound" is not a good sound. Of course it is.
But sometimes, a "bad sound" could be just what you need.

AlienXXX wrote:
I have seen a friend, actually also a Freesounder, (who is far more talented than me) create amazing dance rhythms using an old music program and samples of little shitty beeps and blops that I would have dismissed as rubish...

What's your friend's account? And did he/she post the sounds on there? I'd be interested to check it out.

IanStarGem wrote:

AlienXXX wrote:
I have seen a friend, actually also a Freesounder, (who is far more talented than me) create amazing dance rhythms using an old music program and samples of little shitty beeps and blops that I would have dismissed as rubish...

What's your friend's account? And did he/she post the sounds on there? I'd be interested to check it out.

If I recall correctly, those rhythms became part of this collab piece:
https://soundcloud.com/alienxxx/alienxxx-snapper4298-off-the

Hi everyone,

I agree that low-quality and high-quality are very subjective terms.
As Headphaze pointed out, one way to minimise low-quality sounds (whatever that means) is using the sorting options.
We could however make that more useful by allowing to filter by average rating in the advanced search option. What do you think?

As you know, Freesound development is mostly research-driven, and to turn research outcomes into new features is typically a slow process. In our roadmap, we plan to research in improving the analysis of sounds and providing new ways to search that would, for example, include filtering by noisy and non-noisy sounds. I think this would be very useful but we don't know when we'll be able to actually deploy this as a feature in Freesound.

Regarding the tags, this is a tricky thing As some of you probably know, I've been doing a lot of research on that, and many of you participated in the experiments that I carried out here in Freesound. As a quick summary, my main conclusion is that we should i) particularly encourage the use of some tags whose meaning is well understood in the community (without disregarding other tags), and ii) make uploaders aware of the importance of tagging and encouraging to tag "well" (again quite subjective...). It is also in our roadmap to improve the uploading interface to make this process easier.

Finally, in relation to strangely_gnarled's suggestion, in the past Freesound sounds could be tagged by anyone (not only the uploader). This functionality was removed in Freesound 2 because it was not being used. However, we think that it would be good that members of the community willing to participate more in Freesound could contribute by providing additional tags in existing sounds.

frederic.font wrote:
Finally, in relation to strangely_gnarled's suggestion, in the past Freesound sounds could be tagged by anyone (not only the uploader). This functionality was removed in Freesound 2 because it was not being used. However, we think that it would be good that members of the community willing to participate more in Freesound could contribute by providing additional tags in existing sounds.

Hi Fred!
I strongly support this and I would definitely use this feature.
However, I ask that if it is implemented, it is kept to a restricted number of trusted users.
Not because I am an elitist, but because we have seen a few spammers and trolls here recently.
In the wrong hands, the ability to tag other people's sounds could do a lot of damage, which would then be difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

In FS1 only people who had uploaded sounds could tag other people's sounds.

That would take care of many nines ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation ) of people

- bram

Although it is a good idea, I'm scared of the prospect a little. Because believe it or not there's a limited amount of people I trust in the community (judging by the way people tag their own sounds). No offence, but although that number of trustworthy users is high in my book, we do have trolls inevitably here. And i've seen a good share of really bad tagging coming through moderation.

What about whitelisted uploaders? (this does restrict the opportunity somewhat)

And what about tag suggestions that send a notification to the uploader or moderator about a new improved tagging recommendation on their sound? (this would be the best way to include the majority which also bypasses tolling).

I'm probably thinking too deeply into it, and perhaps it's the case that only dedicated members of the community will even use this opportunity.

Food for thought

Perhaps newer forum user roles may help.
Moderators, Taggers, etc.

Bram wrote:
In FS1 only people who had uploaded sounds could tag other people's sounds.

That would take care of many nines ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation ) of people

- bram

I used to love this feature, but now see so much potential for mis-use and abuse that I would really recommend restricting it to a few trusted users. The idea to give this capability only to whitelisted users sounds good to me.

People can give tag suggestions as a comment under a sound if the realy want to. I can make my own decision to use it or not.

Thats my idea about this discussion.

The system we have now werks fine i think. Keep it simple.