Freesound Forums

hello,

I hope this is the right section to post "feature requests"

#1 =============
anyhow, it could be great to have an option to search "without" a user name,
cause once you have listened to 50 sounds by a certain creator, you'll be familiar with her/his style enough to know that in that specific case you are NOT looking for something like her/his style...
by which you might skip 150 matches and having to go all through them... (by looking, and scrolling, and clicking)

#2 =============
another option could be to "collapse" the list at given usernames...
and have only 1 match from a given creator...

make no mistake, this not only helps searching comfortably...
but also helps creators to get their sounds reach people who are looking for sounds...
if your sound is a needle in a haystack of tons of variations by a sound creator, listing over and over in search pages...
the searcher might give it up...
or might miss your sound... because of the 200 variations of somebody else's sounds

#3 =============
YET ANOTHER way seems to be viable... by the way...
the idea of which comes from "BULK descriptions"...

uploaders could group their sounds in bulks...
and bulks -- like packs -- could be condensed / "collapsed"
in search result list pages...
showing only ONE of 150

this "bulk" mark/flag could be done by the uploader of the system automatically, too...

====== #3/B
an option within this option.. could also be...
that when in a search result list a username appears continuously... like
over 5 times per page, her/his sounds could be saved to a temporary table...
later to be examined...
if the title and description of those sounds... appearing together in the search result list
have something in common
and if they belong to a group...
they could get a bulk "flag", too...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

make no mistake, I am not complaining !!
I only think that the site could work even better...

advance search is a beautiful thing, but it is also something without which life could be impossible and I think it could be just one step more intelligent !

thank you for your work!

Peter

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the suggestions! Indeed your post should have been posted in the "bug reports and feature requests" section https://freesound.org/forum/bug-reports-errors-and-feature-requests/, but no worries.

Uploaders can already group sounds into packs, and packs appear collapsed by default in the search results page (working exactly as you describe). You can disable this option in the advanced search panel. When there are many variations of similar sounds these are typically added to pack, so the collapsing works well.

Being able to group sounds by username in the results page is not currently possible, but it would only make sense if sounds are similar. Therefore we think that grouping by pack should be enough. If you identify a case in which many sounds from the same user could go into a pack and are not organised like that, you can also consider sending a message to the user asking to create a pack.

Thanks for taking your time thinking of possible improvements and writing the suggestions here. We appreciate that!

The search dialog can do some basic searching. That's fine.

However, I have these suggestions:

• I would like to search more formats at the same time like wav and flac at the same time.
• I want a list of all tags available in a sorted list. I'm not sure I get all tags I want to search with.
• I would like the dialog to be correct or have some more helping text. I don't understand "Search in" [] Tags [] File names". Should it be "Search:" [] With tags [] In File names [] ... ?
• 
  
• I would like to combine sort criteria so I get the longest and newest sounds first.
• I would like the sorting to be persistent. The sorting is lost every time I push the Search button.
• I would like the tags to be consistent so I don't have to search with tags like "ambiance", "ambience"or "ambient".

How can I contribute?

Hi janrou,

Thanks for your suggestions. Some comments:

* I would like to search more formats at the same time like wav and flac at the same time.

Defining advanced filters in search interfaces is a classic problem if you want to still keep the interface simple. For example, if choosing two (or more) formats you need some way to define if these should be ANDed or ORed and stuff like that. However I agree we could assume some use cases as, for instance, the AND operator does not make sense for formats (but it does for tags). The new interface we are implementing has support planned for some of these things so hopefully later this year this will be a reality.

* I want a list of all tags available in a sorted list. I'm not sure I get all tags I want to search with.

Not sure what you mean here. You have the tagcloud in the sidebar which should be helpful. Alternatively you can go to the tags page and start a filtering process form there: http://freesound.org/browse/tags

* I would like the dialog to be correct or have some more helping text. I don't understand "Search in" [] Tags [] File names". Should it be "Search:" [] With tags [] In File names [] ... ?

Even though the formulation you propose sounds better for some fields, I don't think it is that different from what we already have and the current version is shorter.

* I would like to combine sort criteria so I get the longest and newest sounds first.

That's a bit more complex because how would you combine the different sorting criterias? Looks like different use cases could benefit of different ways of sorting. Maybe if a small number of use case can be defined we could consider adding some extra sorting criterias that fit them.

* I would like the sorting to be persistent. The sorting is lost every time I push the Search button.

We've seen that sorting is lost when adding a filter. That's definitely a bug and will open an issue to fix it. Thanks for reporting!

* I would like the tags to be consistent so I don't have to search with tags like "ambiance", "ambience"or "ambient".

That's another classic problem. You're right there are many things we could do here and in fact we have some things prepared in that direction, but we need to find some time to spend with it. I'll make sure this does not go too far down in our list.

Cheers,