Freesound Forums

I attempted to make this as a comment to the blog but that seems to be broken, but the forum is probably a better place for a discussion about this anyway:
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With regards to sound studios and making Freesound more useful to "professional" users, it is probably worth looking into a way to implement the Universal Category System (https://universalcategorysystem.com/) file naming convention.
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I'm not sure how this might be implemented if it would be up to the uploader or perhaps the moderation but certainly when I've talked to people in the world about freesound the main complaint they have is finding sound related to the search and also finding sounds of suitable quality. I understand that suitable quality is pretty subjective but still worth thinking about. On a related note would be a discussion about the quality of tags and descriptions and finding a system of improving those.

always,
Tim

Hi Tim,

Thanks for pointing that out. We have been aware about the Universal Category System (UCS) for some years now and have been indeed in touch with some of the people behind it. We're carrying our research on automatic classification of sounds based on different categorizations, and one we want to target (and for which we have lots of labeled data) is the UCS. Also we recently made many changes in the Freesound backend that would allow us to rather easily deploy an automatic classification system to complement user tags. Of course the accuracy of such a system is rather uncertain in the "real world", but these are things we are definitely looking at.

About quality, that is something that we have also been trying to look at to see if there's a way to filter sounds by quality. However, as you mention, quality is very subjective, and we've always come to the conclusion that we need to focus on some "sub aspects" of quality. Maybe this is a discussion worth starting. Can you think of any specific types of filters that you would like to see implemented in Freesound?

Hey Frederic, that's interesting to hear about the classification system. I am currently trying to decide if I should spend the time to update the sounds I've uploaded with the UCS naming convention, but besides it would be a lot of work it gives the title an "ugly" look which is weird to say and I need to get past that.

As for quality filters that of course is complex but mainly I think most users want sounds that are well recorded, not much background noise, the subject is obvious, there isn't a bunch of stuff at the beginning or end. If you look at the sounds with the most downloads they meet those. But certainly there are lots of sounds like that getting lost and I like the idea of people having the possibility to discover a wider variety than just selecting from the most downloaded sounds. I'm sure I'm not really adding to anything that hasn't been considered before though.