Freesound Forums

Hello,

I have a question about tagging.

When the title of a sound is for example "Blacksmith", should I tag it as blacksmith as well?
Same for the description, if it is "hammering on the anvil" should tag it with hammering, anvil?

I have noticed that the search returns results from the tags, title and description.
Is there something more to the tagging that I am missing?

Thanks in advance

Hello,

tags help categorize the sounds more precisely and therefore refine the search so yes, blacksmith, hammering, anvil are relevant keywords in your example.

Suppose I upload some sounds recorded in an imaginary pub named The Blacksmith and mention it in the description but of course not in the tags, then someone comes searching for real blacksmithing sounds like yours: the search result will include my sounds which are of no interest in this case; by clicking on the tags on the right in the result page, the person searching can refine the results and if they choose blacksmith as a tag, your sound would still be included and mine all filtered out.

Also, if you click on "Show advanced search options", you can choose which categories to search in: Tags, File names, Descriptions, Pack names, Sound Ids, User names
so in our example checking Tags but not Descriptions would also filter my sounds out and give a more appropriate result.

HTH

Tags, descriptions and filenames all fulfill different purposes, althought they may sometimes overlap.

I will take your example and make up a little story about it to illustrate.

LEts say you have a day out with your girlfriend. You go to a medieval fair. You take your recorder along.
One of the stalls / shops on the fair is the recreation of a medieval blacksmith. This is where you made your recording.

Filename.
LEts say you made several recordings that day. Depending on how you organize your samples you could have several samples named "balcksmith", "knight duel", "crowd cheer", "bard", ... etc...
Or you could have a folder of samples simply named "medieval fair 001!, "medieval fair 002"...
Or maybe you keep things organized by dates "14-Feb-2014 rec 001", "14-Feb-2014 rec 002"...
So the filename may or may not be a good description of what is on it (from other people's perspective) and you may not want to rename the samples you upload to Freesound.

Description
Here you could add all sorts of details. What was the weather like? Was the recorging in side or outside? What equipment and post-processing was used? Any faults with the recording (wind noise, ambient noise, clipping) on any particular point of the recording?
Date, time of day, location...
etc etc
Or you could have only a very simple description such as "recording made at a medieval fair."
There are no set rules when it comes to descriptions.

Tags
The main benefit about tags is that you can include additional keywords that would be too much to put on a tittle or description.
So, even if your file is called "blacksmith" there are plenty of additional keywords that are synonims or related to blacksmith or to the sounds heard on the recording. Here are a few (including the ones you mentioned already).
blacksmith, anvil, hammer, metal, metalworks, hammering, clang, workshop, sword, furnace, ironmonger, iron, iron-working
What about others that could provide additional context?
medieval, middle-ages, sword-making

The Freesound search system uses all of the above to try to present the most relevan files on default searches, but you can be more specific and refine your search afterwards pressing the "advanced search" button and then selecting only to look at tags, for example.

When people search for sounds, they can come from many different directions and with many different ideas.
Imagine a guy is putting together a Lego movie with a scene on a construction site. He is looking for "hammering" sounds. Althought he does not care about medievasl knights, blacksmiths or ironmongers, he might still find your recording useful. - He could find your sound if you used the tag "hammering".

Ok, understood.

Thanks