Freesound Forums

http://bram.smartelectronix.com/tmp/rules.html

did I miss anything?
please help!

- Bram

Hola Bram:

Since there is such a divergent range of opinion about what constitutes a song or a sample, (you could lay all the musicians in the world end to end to end and they still wouldn't reach a conclusion) perhaps you should try to approach this problem from another angle.

I would respectfully suggest that the only reason to have rules is to promote a desired end. You might have better luck trying to define what, exactly, you wish to accomplish and make the rules accordingly, since I doubt you will be able to come up with a clean, "black or white" test to apply to all the audio files you will get.

As a personal aside, if you haven't heard the word "thanks" yet this week for wrestling with The Big Questions and for keeping Freesound going, I'd like to slip in a quick "gracias por ese."

Tio Ed
Austin, Texas
Land Of 10,000 Guitar Players With Day Jobs

I agree with Texas Music Forge's sentiments. What is the ultimate purpose of the restriction/distinction?

I might hear someone place on here what is basically a song and just yank a snippet of it to loop or transform and put that small sample in another song. The author had no idea what I might use but gladly let me make a sample out of it in whatever way I wanted.

I consider that a good thing, but maybe it gets in the way of organization and bandwidth/memory restrictions of the site.

i understand them, and they're cool with me....
pretty much self explanatory i think....

one question though just to be really clear......

so if we post a composition (not limited to songs, but anything) we did using freesound files, it's ok to link to it from other urls, but they're not to be uploaded here into the sound library, right, because it's not classified as a 'sound' technically, but as a composition?

so if i used a sound of a train in a composition, i can credit the author of the train sound and link to my composition?

cool,

and thanks bram

I think some song/music samples can be sounds first and foremost, for example if the context of the musical element is within some time, space, or place then I would argue that its prime meaning is the environment it conveys not the musical ideas (and though I admit the two are often intertwinded, I think this only highlights the difficulty in setting out clear catorgories within art and does not dimminish the validity of the sample as a sound).

Perhapse the suggested statment of intent might help get your points across more effectively?

I got no idea what goes on behind the scenes here, but like eveyone else who keeps coming back to this site, I dont want to imagine a world with out it! It is excellent on many levels, as shown by the quality of contributer it attracts (I'm only speaking about me of course )

Woah, old thread.

I think the idea is that freesound is not here for the purpose of being another soundclick or whatever. ccMixter already serves that purpose for creative commons-licensed stuff.

So stuff that is clearly a "song" - your band doing rock music, your super cool new house track, etc. does not belong here.
A recording of people singing and dancing is another matter.

It's not always a clear line what is a sample and what is a song. We might have to paraphrase Justice Stewart's famous quote, in that we "know it when we hear it."

I split a guitar solo into 3 parts a year or two ago to get around Bram . It was not a song to say, it was part of a song and it's still up. CCmixter is the best place for whole songs though and it links to the sounds here and for some reason searches better to help you attribure properly. When I cannot figure out what sounds went where I upload an MP3 at ccmixter and copy that attribution to the archive.org description. CCmixter uses MP3's only for tracks which is lame (no pun intended) but www.archive.org lets you post any file type of any thing, songs, software, videos, etc.

It seems easy to me:

If you are walking down the street and a marching band thunders in while you are recording squirels mating, it's a field recording. If you set up microphones or plug into a soundboard at a concert or sit in front of a PC meticulously assembling TacTacShutup's drum samples into beats, add some bass, guitar or other instruments, and god forbid sing, it's a song. If you break up the parts into loops or multisamples others can use to make songs it is not a song. That's just my take...

I hardly ever see anything that falls outside of the scoop of this project in the approve list, I think it has grown into what it is and its clearly working.