Freesound Forums

The upload page specifies that we are not to upload complete songs or compositions. I would like to know why exactly this is and what the canon attitude is toward the uploading of music in the current era.

In the interest of making Freesound as good as it can be, and making its body of contained work as broad-spectrum as possible, it only makes sense that we should sometimes upload music, provided it was created by us.

I'm aware that many sites such as YouTube have lax or ambiguous policies which allow nefarious agents to copyright squat items which are offered as CC0 here on FS. My efforts to counteract this have consisted mostly of uploading the items to YouTube before anyone else can do it, along with making records of these items' creation, so that it can be proven that I created them all. This seems sufficient.

It's also evident that complete compositions are on another level of complexity concerning the implementation of copyright. If I make a song with 25 samples from 20 different oldschool hip-hop songs, that might get past YouTube's content filter, but at present it's impossible to say what potential detrimental effects it may have on Freesound.

Every day, people upload sounds which are made with public-domain VST plugins. As I understand it, you cannot put custom terms on a CC0 release. You cannot demand people to credit you, or to refrain from selling your work. You can only demand that no one else's rights to represent the material surpass your own. So, CC0 releases all rights save the right of the creator to be represented as the creator, and the right of the creator to change the license to one of another type in the future. Therefore any legal conflict surrounding CC0 licensing would be a case where something was changed from CC0 after the fact and someone downloaded it after the fact, assuming the CC0 terms were still in effect when they weren't. That seems like an entrapment situation which would favor the defendant in a court case.

Well, what are the staff's thoughts on this? Is music just "outside the scope of mere sounds" or is there a legal reason why it's discouraged?

Hi @strangehorizon,

Thanks for initiating this discussion. Freesound was started only around a year after CC licenses had been introduced and the idea was to focus it on sound effects or music "building blocks" rather than on finished music tracks because that made more sense for sounds to be reusable. There were websites existing already for music tracks (like soundcloud for example, or ccMixter), with a more traditional structure around the concept of "artist" and "album". Also it is true that not allowing music was good to avoid problems with rights collecting societies, and this was a strong argument for discouraging music. (NOTE: I edited this sentence to clarify that the legal aspect was indeed an important motivation).

At the moderation stage sometimes it is sometimes difficult to decide when music should or should not be allowed in Freesound. I'd say that normally it is allowed when it is not "finished" (e.g. instrument samples, loops, maybe longer music fragments but normally not songs in their traditional sense) or when there is some context in the recording of particular value which makes it relevant beyond the actual music (e.g. a street recording which illustrates an acoustic environment). But yeah, the line is sometimes quite blurry.

That reply raises more questions than answers. A few points:

Soundcloud charges you money to upload more than 180 minutes of material. It's inundated with bots and promo services (which it is totally impotent to stop and in fact seems to be funding), it artificially promotes certain artists over all others (including weighting some search results over overs), and its bias toward rap and hip-hop makes it all but impossible for real users to discover material in other genres. Most SC creators do not allow their tracks to be downloaded, and most SC users are not aware that clicking the "...More" button can sometimes yield a download link. SC is serving a wholly different set of functions than Freesound, and is not truly analogous. Additionally, their codebase is janky to the extreme.

I've uploaded a decent assortment of songs to FS and fail to see how their "finished" nature makes them less useful as resources. Many users who come here don't have a full-fledged DAW and so they're relying on our pre-production to make some sounds useful. We tend to upload loops and fragments in as dry (unprocessed) a state as possible, while finished songs tend to be wetter and more produced. These two states of production serve different needs and roles for different users. Further, finished songs present the same opportunities for remixing, beat-slicing, etc., before we even mention the advent of audio stem separators like MVSep.

Dozens of users, myself included, have uploaded finished music on here and found it to be in demand as a resource. People come here looking for film scores, music for their indie games, and more. When they find it, they tend to be rather grateful about it. I've played strangers' games with my own music in them. When considering the points you've presented thus far, it's hard to ascribe real significance to the "no music" rule. In any case, it doesn't seem to be enforced, and probably shouldn't be.

A majority of sounds I upload here are "finished" in that they are trimmed, tuned, and/or denoised, in addition to whatever post-production they might have. Like the music tracks, these are not raw sounds either - they're made to be thrown right in a sampler and played in-pitch and in-time. There's a case for these sounds not being "natural" enough, but nobody minds. They download and use them.

Hi,

Yes you're right that "finished" music content is very useful and people come to Freesound also to find that. What I meant by not allowing "finished" music is that precisely we did not want Freesound to become a Soundcloud, and that we want people to be pefectly aware that content here can be transformed and reused unlike in more traditional music hosting websites like those I mentioned or even others with CC licenses like Jamendo. But as you say, we've been allowing lots of music as well. Maybe the moderators can provide their view point about that topic as this is a recurrent discussion we have.

Right on. I don't mean to be argumentative either. It's just that this subject matter has many finer points, some of which are in the rules/policies and some of which are in the human element itself. It also seems that this subject has not been decisively settled, and maybe it never can be (given the international nature of an internet website), but it would at least be nice to know what considerations to make.

Interesting discussion. One that's come up time immemorial. Frederic has explained very succinctly, so there's not much for me to say.

I agree wholeheartedly about the legal aspect. It would be a great deal more difficult for the moderators if songs were allowed to be published on here.

But, I just want to add that we do in fact see quite a lot of music (that's not simple short loops) come through moderation that is acceptable, for example ~1 minute long pieces that are good for film score building. Or music beds for theatre / art installations. It's almost always instrumental. But that's music that we believe is useful to the people that come here for content; based on our established philosophy.

Conversely, what we reject is produced music "songs" that are clearly just bedroom or studio music tracks (most often with lyrics) that people want to share that have no real place on this site, but belong on Soundcloud / Bandcamp / Spotify etc etc.

There are already a wealth of platforms out there that cater to royalty free or CC music.

That is my two cents anyway

Cheers,
Sam

What if we just want to use Freesound and not SoundCloud (which sucks for reasons already mentioned), Bandcamp (which only accepts HQ files that are too large for serious creators to use and keep around in quantity, and which forces you to release everything in album format), or Spotify (which is geared heavily toward paid music and has a number of other problems of its own)?

All I'm hearing is "We don't want music because other sites have music". It's an oblique response of the type which I've come to accept as typical on this forum...

Are you guys giving any serious thought to Freesound's usefulness or posterity? I can upload a 4-hour rainstorm, or a gigabyte of cricket noises, but not a 2MB file containing public-domain music I made from scratch just for the people who might find it on here? What kind of priorities are these? As time goes on, it seems more and more like this site is designed to upset people.

Freesound could be the coolest and most comprehensive audio site in the world, bursting at the seams with all manner of performances and experiments, but instead it has to be a dull grey filing cabinet whose drawer only opens to ask people for money. I no longer have an ounce of confidence or faith that this site will ever move in the right direction again. My association with Freesound is ended.

My opinion is one little ripple on a stormy sea of opinion but personally I come here because it is not swamped by waves of music.

Sea horses for courses.

Respect, Wibby

Speaking as a Freesound user, I appreciate the fact that Freesound exists for recordings that don't fit other places on the web, and - to paraphrase strangely_gnarled - are easy to browse and search without having to go through a lot of music.

Speaking as a moderator, allowing complete musical compositions would greatly increase the difficulty of the moderators' job, if the moderator is expected to weed out copyrighted or pirated material. This could have the effect of increasing the wait time for moderation (already often 2 days or more), as well as putting potential downloaders at legal risk, and perhaps even Freesound itself, if a mod approved something that should not have been. This is already difficult enough with sound effects and music snippets. Maybe some ways to mitigate that could be invented, but that's another discussion.

I'm not saying I'm opposed to it, necessarily, but that it would introduce new problems that need to be solved. I guess one question is: could or should Freesound be the answer to the deficiencies of other music sites?

Just my 2 cents worth. Note that I'm just a member, not Freesound staff, although I do volunteer as a moderator.

As a musician myself I know several sites giving you the opportunity to publish songs.

I would not allow full music on freesound because it would be hell of work to check if the uploaded music really does not hit DMCA. The only music I uploaded here was a very short starting hymn which already has been used several times. This piece also has been downloaded by someone else who provided it on youtube as completly free without asking me.

Do keep freesound free of music to make it easier. I like freesound because of all the short sounds and not the long tracks.

cheerz
Richard

1) Bandcamp
Id advocate for Bandcamp, but my faith in it is going away as it was sold to Epic Games then Songtradr few months later.
It could easily go in a fishy direction.

Furthermore creators must have a paypal I think? Sounds can be free but's it's extra effort to make it "pay what you want", I think there's also a free download quota ? After 100 downloads per month or so it then becomes at a fee against the creator's will.
Also it can't be 100% free, best you can do is "pay what you want", which is good to contribute to the creator, but the creator cannot refuse money.

BUT so far it's the best option imo to host unlimited music, easy download for the consumer, they can even stream their purchases or download. It's convenient and artist friendly so far.

Yes it does force us to upload in HQ, I don't see a big issue there. Can export or "upscale" a dirty 64kbps mp3 to flac, upload it and it makes no sense but it works. Their the one hosting all that data so their problem.
As for the local creator. I don't think someone makes music faster than they can expand their hard-drive for hours on end of WAV.
Being concerned of filling up a hard drives long term of music composition because they're FLAC instead of mp3's sounds like insane amounts of music making time. And to me is ironic from field recording domain.

So for music hosting, the problems I see with Bandcamp is A) Requires Paypal info, B) If you're terribly successful, it's no longer free for your audience. C) Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a for profit business, so I'm not optimistic where things might change.
All in all, mostly good and convenient, I have yet to meet a better alternative

2) Should Freesound host music ?
I'm open to it, but it would require a special music section tab/search/upload section, like a side website at that point lol Or very very good filtering.
I do not want to have to search Sounds, samples, amongst music!
I'd be happy if such a thing was implemented and correctly done so (which demands a lot)

But it's not a thing I feel the need for, as alternatives are good enough for me for now. I can only imagine the trouble to implement it and moderate it and host it.

And TBH with myself, even if it were coming for sure and Freesound was happy to have it. Id honestly complain that it's considered before polishing the website as a whole (UI, features, Preview quality, ease of use etc...)
I just don't see it as a priority for now if it were an option.

In short :
Bandcamp very usable but not perfect. Don't have music, not a priority and probably not worth the effort when there are alternatives, but would be cool!

Peace.