Freesound Forums
Rating sounds on Freesound
Started November 29th, 2012 · 12 replies · Latest reply by Kyster 11 years, 11 months ago
For those of you, who are always giving 5-star ratings to sounds they like.
There are five individual stars.
Before you rate - hover mouse above each star and read what is written there:
*.... - pretty bad 
**... - quite good
***.. - good 
****. - very good
***** - amazing 
Don't always give 5 stars - It's not helping to sort sounds by quality.
Not all sounds are amazing, jawdropping, and the best you've ever heard.
Here are some questions to help you get an idea of what a quality sound can be like:
- Is there much static noise in the recording?
- Are there unwanted sounds in the background?
- Is the recording distorted?
- Is there wind blowing into the microphones?
- Does the sound have a big dynamic range?
- Does the recording have safe margins for editing?
- Does the recording contains several versions of the same sound for variety?
- Is the file monophonic or stereophonic?
- Is the sound data badly compressed?
- Does the sound have an obscure name or description?
Thank you for your attention
Hello,
I agree with this. Accurate ratings will help people find what they are looking for as well as give the owners a good idea of how well they did with their sound.
I myself have not rated any sounds yet, partially due to the fact that I only just found out that ratings were possible. But this is a good guideline for ratings.
I have one question regarding ratings:
It seems that one of my sounds cannot be rated while all the others I see can be. What would the reason be for not being able to rate a sound?
Sincerely,
Thank you for your reply.
That's what I thought at first, but it appeared as though I could rate my other sound.
I wouldn't rate my own to "cheat" or "self praise" my own profile, but I do understand that some people would.
It's when I highlighted the rating I was surprised to find out that it was reacting as if I could rate it, whereas the other one wouldn't highlight.
-Okay, I can't rate either of them now, even though I never actually did. It must have been some kind of glitch, even though I did refresh the page. But now it has one five-star rating. That's weird.
So I guess it was just messing me up.
Thanks anyway.
Ratings seem useless to me. Everything seems to hover around mid-high. I don't pay attention. The quality of a sound - rather, it's usefulness - can be seen by the amount of downloads, not a 1-5 star rating.
Bad quality sounds have both high rating and big nr. of downloads. The only way to know is to listen.
Sounds are also rated by very few people, so it's not really statistically relevant. If it was rated by 100+ people, we could start to talk about relevant rating.
Timbre wrote:EagleStealthTeam wrote:
... What would the reason be for not being able to rate a sound?Members are blocked from rating their own sounds ( self-praise is no recommendation).
I've rated all my sounds (although I think I stopped doing it after this post first came up). I did that to increase the relevancy (just because I thought my sounds were relevant and had decent descriptions to not lure people into downloading my sounds just for the sake of it,(and also because I thought some of my sounds were unique yet unsearchable).
I was banking on an unaffirmed fact that rated sounds may be more relevant and actually show up higher in the rankings on the first few pages rather than the last few (again I was not doing it because I wanted my sounds to be more popular, but instead stand out and pop right up for people who wanted exactly that sound).
I still, however, have the ability to rate all my sounds.
The star rating system would be much more useful if the number of votes cast was shown on search and preview pages next to the star-bar.. If a sound only has e few votes, the rating is meaningless but if it has 50 votes averaging 4 or 5 stars then it is statistically significant and likely to be a good sound. Unfortunately there isn't an easy (obvious) way to check this without clicking to the sound's page.
Also I'm getting proportionally many fewer people voting on Freesound 2 than Freesound 1 where there was a box encouraging you to vote. I only discovered that you could vote by hovering over the star-bar accidentally. It doesn't seem to be a documented feature: Even the text box on mouse-over looks like it's simply telling what the ratings mean rather than an invitation to vote. (I did bring this up in some old post soon after the launch of FS2 but there was no response.)
I have to say I only vote if I'm going to give a rating of 4 or 5; I really can't bring myself to knock somebody who might be trying hard but isn't very good. A comment or PM to them could be constructive but a vote of one star doesn't help anybody. When I look at the stars on my own sounds I assume that if I've got a three star or more average with the number of votes in the double figures then a few people think the sound is usefully decent even if others don't.
Anyway, Merry Seasons Greetings, and kudos to any Wise Men following a Star (or Five).
Wibby.
IMDB shows rating only after "enough" nr of votes. That would make sense here too, but there are just too many sounds and very little will to rate them. Perhaps that would change if you had to rate the sound to be able to download it. But I'm not sure it is worth it.
The OP has got a point, but i don't agree in everything.
Giving points to a sound can rely on a lot of things. Poor quality is not always a bad thing i can imagine. Basically it all comes down taste and need. If a user needs a mp3 format, it's likely the user rates after that, and feels it save some work regarding post editing. If a user searches for a dirty (as in a sound with noise / background noise) the sound with just that, is a good sound, etc.
So what some users rate poor, others will rate good. It's really something that can't be discussed.
Points is often given in relation to what people need, and we should remember that.