Freesound Forums

Hey!

I've noticed almost no one cares about naming their sounds. Vast majority of sounds have names copied from file names with ugly ".wav" at the end.

I wonder if we could at least automatically strip the ".wav" from sound names to make it look better...

What do you think of this?

Hi there. Is this really necessary?

The way I see it is that it does look better without the filetype in the name, although it is purely aesthetic. I find its more useful to see that an audio file is in .wav format straight away on the list, since most of the users on this website are highly attracted to this format it stands to reason to keep it in.

to see the extension is important I think. Clever tagging is important.

Hey, why not strip the extension and instead add a little icon beside the name with the file type in it?

Would make it clear and look better. Leaving the extension in sound name feels clumsy to me or like someone is uploading a sound and he didn't even care to name it. I personally care a lot for my sounds to not only sound good but also look good.

If you look closely at a sounds page, there's a box to the right, under the player, with all the info you need. It gives you type, duration, filesize, samplerate, bitdepth and channels. I figure that should be sufficient info about a sound to satisfy any questions other than the story behind the sound. Why not use that, instead of adding even more to a sounds page?

Also, calling it wav, aif, flac or what ever, is really fine i think. When browsing files quickly without going to the individual page, it's nice to know if i'm looking at a wav or mp3 file.

.Wav speaks to me. It carries weight. Sometimes I include it in the filename by intent.

I can understand the argument about naming. To be honest, if searching for, say 'train' sounds, when i get the results page i am more likely to click the preview of a sound called "train.wav" or "choo-choo.wav" than "A1103111933.wav"...

But as for the ".wav" extension on the name... i don't even see it anymore unless i am looking for it!

@Kyster:
Yes, but that box is only visible when you click at a sound, you can't see any of this when you browse through sounds (unless there is file name extension in sound's name).

I think that if Freesound exposed filetype by the sound's name on all lists with a special icon, people woudn't need to add ".wav" or ".mp3". You'd see the same thing but in a cleaner, more organized and easier-to-read way.

With (presumably) tons of things to improve in FS, this is indeed a weird request
By the way, .wav is nice to me (and .flac makes my day)

I don't care so much about .wav or .mp3 being a part of the name, but I do agree with poster that many sound names on freesound are terrible and not always descriptive.

If one thing comes out of this discussion it could be just a reminder to make good tags, and good filenames for the sake of future generations.

I suspect this is one of those threads that you either strongly agree with... or violently disagree with...

Here is another thought.
My configuration of windows does not show the extensions for known file types. (I kinow I can change this). But anyway, what ends up happening is that if I render a project to wav and then want to create an mp3 version for fast uploading, I end up putting "mp3" on that file name, so I can easily distinguish the two files in my system without having to look at their sizes.
I don't normally upload mp3 files to Freesound, but this is a simple reason why files could end up with "mp3", "wav", etc in the filenmane.

As to the filenames themselves.
Here is another interesting one. When I download sounds from Freesound I never change the names of the files. Why? So that when I use them in a project I know exactly the Freesound file and user that I need to give credit to. At most, if I create aseveral versions of the file "12345__User_Sound", I would call them something like "12345_short", "12345_reverb", "12345_LP_filter"...
As I don't often change the filenames, I do prefer taht the names are a bit descriptive: "12345__User_Train" is easier for me to work with than "12345__User_X4998727".

But that is just me. Ths is a difficult one to solve as different people will have different preferences and ways to work with.
Some people will find it easy to have the filetype on the name. Others will find it annoying...