Freesound Forums

Hello all,
I was recently in need (once again) to create an attribution list for a film I worked on. I have found the online attribution list inadequate because it shows every file I downloaded, not all of which wind up in the finished film. The first time I wrote a bash script that listed the directory where I have the files, grabbed the sample ID from the beginning of the file name, and spat it back as a URL. Nice, but it doesn't quite fulfill our attribution guidelines of author and sample name.

Faced with a similar situation and armed with more programming experience, I embarked on a more ambitious solution.

I thought you all might appreciate it. It's called the Freesound Attributor.

Consider this an Alpha release. It appears to work in the cases I have tested it with but the file name parsing code is not particularly intelligent and will probably produce some odd-looking names at some point. If you would like to download the alpha version, here is the latest installer:
Download Freesound Attributor v1.0 (Windows)

Here is a screenshot:
http://eliot.wendielash.com/distro/FreesoundAttributor2.PNG

In order for it to work, you must keep the beginning of the file name relatively intact because that is how it can extract the sample ID, author, and sample name. You can put all your samples in one directory and have it parse that directory, or point it in succession at several directories and save the output somewhere.

It supports limited user-configurable file name processing to allow for removal of unnecessary strings. For instance, Pro Tools likes to split stereo files into mono and append .L and .R, or add the name of the AudioSuite processor being used along with a region split number. By adding one of these per line in one of the "Strings to remove" fields, you can tell Freesound Attributor to remove them from file names in the attribution list.

It will not (or at least it *SHOULD* not) modify your files or rename them, it only looks at their names to generate a text list.

Right now it's written in C# because I wrote it for personal use and that's the language I'm most comfortable in from doing a lot of XNA stuff. It can theoretically run under Mac OS X and Linux using mono if you have mono installed (although I have only tested it in mono under windows so far.) If there is enough interest in having it run on these OSes I might try porting it to Java's SWT so it can run on Mac OS X and Linux with a "native look and feel" without having to have a mono runtime (of course you would need a java runtime but those seem to be more common, and is certainly included with Mac OS X.)

In the spirit of the freesound project, it is released under the GNU GPL v3. The source code for v1.0 is available as a zip and depends on the Microsoft .NET Framework. If you would like to obtain the latest development version, you can download it from my bitbucket mercurial repository at http://bitbucket.org/fadookie/freesoundattrib

Let me know if you find this program useful, and if so what features you would want the most (e.g. directory recursion, selecting specific files in a browser, regular expression parsing, etc.) I must stress, please make this a feature you know you actually need, not just something that sounds cool! My time is limited and I'd like to focus on practicality.

And if you find any bugs/crashes please post them in this thread with a description of what you were doing, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened. If you can manage to get a Windows error report to send along as well that would be great, but in my experience, Windows doesn't make it easy to extract those...

And lastly, it can be uninstalled from the windows "Add and Remove Programs" control panel.

Thanks!

-Halleck

Wow, that's a potentially very useful piece of code there.

I may just try it out.

I will give some feedback if I do, just have to make some time.

NoiseCollector
Wow, that's a potentially very useful piece of code there.

I may just try it out.

I will give some feedback if I do, just have to make some time.

Thanks!

Per Plagasul's request on the mailing list for a mac port, I have begun work on a cross-platform port using Java/SWT (the IBM Standard Widget Toolkit.) Here is a screenshot of my SWT GUI mock-up running on Mac OS 10.4.

This is a great learning experience for me as it's my first cross-platform GUI application (not counting mono since that just works out of the box more or less!) I'm glad several people are interested.