Freesound Forums

Hello guys,

Soundcloud ( http://www.soundcloud.com ) has contacted me and has asked me if we (freesound) would be interested in a feature for freesound 2:

An optional checkbox in your settings that says: "if I upload sounds to freesound also put them on my soundcloud account".

Soundcloud likes collecting sounds and so do we, but soundcloud is obviously a paying service. I do see the point from their side (they want to collect as many sound libraries), but I don't know how useful it is for us (why go from a free to a paying service?).

EDIT: soundcloud can be perfectly free for DOWNLOADING, they even have creatve commons licenses now. It's just that UPLOADING is not free after "120minutes" of uploads per month. See this comparison chart: http://soundcloud.com/premium Recently they have been doing things like this: http://soundcloud.com/olpc-samples

If such an option would exist, would you use it? Do you like this idea?

- Bram

If freesound gets embedding i see no point. I feel there is a conflict in philosophy.

[edit] Would it also work the other way? Allow us to post our soundcloud sounds to freesound?

I've voted no, i don't like it.

Edit:

I too feel there is a conflict in philosophy.

I think it will work when both Freesound and Soundcloud will exist in similar form. For now it's too unclear what Soundcloud will do with Freesound sample.

I voted that I would not use it, but I am still reflecting on pros and cons of good or bad idea.

Despite my natural leaning toward the idea of cross-cooperation, my gut reaction is BAD idea.

One concern that bothers me is that according to soundcloud's TandC you can upload the sound with one CC licence then change it later. Licensing is already an intellectual swamp, and the idea that a the CCL can be changed makes that swamp radioactive.

Imagine I upload something that proves to be popular and commercially valuable so I decide to change the CC terms to something more restrictive to capitalise on it. (I have not explored soundcloud to see if there are any restrictions in place.)

I think cross linking 'twixt freesound and soundcloud would require much more thought than just adding a "button". There would need to be lots of cogs behind the scene to ensure that the CCLs, and possibly other things, remained synchronised. Freesound's T and C would need to be extended to exclude any endorsement of soundcloud and liability resulting from such cross-posting.

Also, I do not see any obvious way that freesound's exposure would be enhanced by this, and I have some sympathy with Anton's and Kyster's point about "conflict in philosophy."

On the other hand, each freesound member maintains the right to do what she/he (they) want with their files, and putting a convenience feature in freesound for those that wish to avail themselves of it shouldn't be too much skin off the noses of those that don't. (If someone decides to script up a large garish flash-animated button on every page I will change my mind about this last point!)

How could items from a free service be shared with a paying service ? That doesnt make any sense.

At the other hand, soundcloud could be brave and handle every sound that comes from a freesound account into
a soundcloud account as a seperate category and also keep them FREE, among all soundcloud members, without restriction.

What started as a free-for-all-, collaborative community effort cannot be sold for money by some other party.

So, imho, it *could* work, but only under the condition that Soundcloud keeps the incoming Freesound samples
for free, accessible to all SC members, aka totally unchanged license.

EDIT:

After 5 sec of extra thinking about it : whats the point really...that would be merely duplicating sounds on two different online services...
why not just stick with a FS and SC account..

Ronny Ragtroll
How could items from a free service be shared with a paying service ? That doesnt make any sense.

Wait... downloading from soundcloud is free! Having an account with a lot of samples notmally isn't.
But soundcloud has been doing thee kinda things lately:

http://soundcloud.com/olpc-samples

What they mentioned is that people from freesound would get infinite storage for free, but then I don't get it: getting a freesound account would be an interesting loophole to get a infinite-free soundcloud account.

- bram

So are they offering a 'Pro Plus' account ? It looks like that one is the only unlimited type.

The major bottleneck for ms is crediting all the sample creators when i use them. I'd rather have easy "this track uses the following CC-licensed samples" boxes on soundcloud rather than straight-up paired uploads

hey guys, Nils from Soundcloud here. first off I wanna say that we love the freesound community and your contributions to the creative commons!

I'd like to take the opportunity of explaining some background to such a feature.

Our goal is to be a the audio platform for the web and provide you with the best tools for uploading and sharing audio available. Making it a kick-ass platform for cc is a big part of that! Samples is an amazing expression of the creative commons will and as a music producer I'm sharing and looking for new ones all the time.

CC is all about sharing your contributions to the commons and in this case that would be sharing your samples in as many contexts as possible. More than having them publicly available on SoundCloud, the sharing can be further improved by using our widgets to embed players throughout the interwebs. Audio within the SoundCloud ecosystem can then be used throughout our openly available api and various open source projects. we think that would be awesome!

To make that part easier for you we are happy to support mirroring of your freesound content. This would include handling tags, licensing and setting you up with accounts/syncing with your current.

There's a lot of possibilities to keep samples uploaded via freesound tied to the community by auto adding them to a Freesound group, adding tags and information about how they were uploaded.

here's a few links hat might be interesting:
blog.soundcloud.com/2010/08/19/reuse-soundcloud-style/
blog.soundcloud.com/2010/06/30/sample-time/
blog.soundcloud.com/2010/07/26/sample-time-part-2/

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions whatsoever!

/n

Nils, hi.

Your post is great but it answers none of the questions we had above... As you know I am a GREAT fan of soundcloud, so please consider these comments as constructive criticism...

* freesound has no limit. How would you solve this? People want to be able to manage their own samples (on soundcloud) and want to have control over them. Just having all the sampes in one "freesound" account won't do, and most of the active uploaders here have a LOT more than 120 minutes of sound. Benboncan (one of our most respected uploaders) asks: "So are they offering a 'Pro Plus' account ?"

* would there be a "post to freesound" in soundcloud?

* you say embedding and sharing, but people will be able to embed and share just as well in freesound. What is the advantage of having your things in two locations?

* if people want to change the license under which they share material (Freesound2 will support CC-BY, CC-BY-NC and CC-Zero) we would need something in place that syncs these changes to soundcloud, or the user would have to do the changes again.

* there is no advantage of seeing comments/votes/... in two locations, it just makes things more difficult.

* soundcloud offers no "original file download" for free account types and has number of downloads per track set to 100...

In general I think copying samples to SC is PERFECT for large, static collections like the One Laptop per Child repositories. But for very active collections where things change the whole time it seems... difficult.

- Bram

Hi Nils from Soundcloud

I hope my previous post didn't sound TOO negative. I think the Freesound community is made from people with a wide spectrum of interests and expectations, but I'm sure you've already sussed this. Some just like sounds and recording - natural or synth, others want a source of samples to manipulate and be creative with and/or a place to find an audience. To me this is a gravy mix which stirs up well (lumps and all.

I think that whichever way Freesound develops it will please some and annoy others. I personally am only an occasional sound recorder/sound manipulator with no particular talent but a strong general interest in the whole process. The only creative audio stuff I do is SFX and PA for a local Drama Group and I found Freesound while searching for material/inspiration for a Stage Play. So, although I've uploaded very little and actually used nothing I downloaded yet, I still enjoy the community. I personally have my appetite satisfied here, and so probably wouldn't want to interact with Soundcloud but I can imagine many members might. I like the simplicity of the Freesound forum and my only (selfish) personal hope is that it doesn't become cluttered with excess gratuitous functionality and widgets and all that. Having said all that, I (didn't) wouldn't vote against cross cooperation. It's not a facility that I would use personally, but I wouldn't want to take the option away from other members.

Hahaa... That's my 7 cents worth (inflation adjusted)

Regards,
Wibby

Bram,

If there were a link in the upload/describe/tag page and users could "Tag" individual files to be mirrored to a Soundcloud Account, rather than an all or nothing user account setting, wouldn't that give a useful feature for those who like it without the complications? Freesound's disclaimer would simply say that it was the members responsibility to manage their files + CC, so usage/account/download etc. restrictions or caps at Soundcloud would be handled by them and not impinge on Freesound at all. Many members currently keep copies of their soundfiles on their own website or other servers, so all we would be doing is offering our members an easy facility. In return any files cross posted in this way would automatically be tagged with a freesound logo at Soundcloud - or some such.

It might not be full "cross-cooperation" between the sites, but it is much easier to implement without all the complicated issues to sort out. If a user hits the 120minute cap at Soundcloud it would just be handled there as it currently is.

And Freesound could gain some exposure to Soundcloud users who viewed Xposted files.

strangely_gnarled,

nononono, we're not talking about storing all files on SoundCloud!!!
we're talking about mirroring on the user's request

[x] when I upload file to freesound automatically add them to my soundcloud account

I don't think I would use it. Freesound's meeting my sound needs already, I don't need more.
but thanks for the offer.

Sorry Bram, I don't think that's what I meant.

Maybe I'm totally confused.

I thought I was talking about mirroring, but on a file by file basis at a users request rather than on an account by account basis.

i.e. instead of button
[x] when I upload file to freesound automatically add them to my soundcloud account
on an accounts setting page,

there would be
[x] automatically add <b>THIS</b> file to my soundcloud account (or NOT if I don't press the button)

The option to mirror (or not) would be a button on the upload/describe page, and not a global setting in the users account details - other than registering his SoundcloudUserName on your database before the option could be enabled for that user. This way a user could mirror individual files he wanted to but not mirror ones he didn't want to.

Am I totally missing something? (Hahaa.. it's happened before!)

Have I got the concept of mirroring wrong? I always thought it meant putting a copy on the mirror server?

All I'm suggesting is a button to mirror individual files when they are uploaded - or the details are edited. Rather than a button to say
[x] mirror every thing I upload.

It's not especially clear to me how this might benefit me the user, Freesound, or Soundcloud, other than having a (partial) mirror of the sounds. It's just that I have quite a lot of sounds and get requests and so on, and having that sort of thing come from more than once place makes it more complicated (check Freesound messages, check Soundcloud messages, check email, etc.). I'm not sure exactly how it is addressed in Freesound 2, but Soundcloud does offer somewhat better ability to interact with users/listeners (the ability to reply directly to a comment and more importantly notify them of the reply, on sounds for example).
Besides, isn't there already some sort of "partnership" with ccmixter.org that integrates the Freesound database? Would the Soundcloud arrangement be much different?
Perhaps my comment seems overly negative, I don't mean it in that way, currently I don't see any reason why I would use this, but I'm certainly open to being convinced otherwise.

Corsica_S: great comment/analysis actually...

In my eyes the (only) advantages could be:

for freesound: having the sounds in another location, on another server -> extra security (although we already have the sounds at 2 different locations)
for soundcloud: more people coming to their site, more money

But, I agree. I think this thread is almost closed with "no" being the final answer.

By the way, for freesound2 the biggest advantage will be for me: the ability to add new features with less work. As you know Freesound (1 and 2!) is really a one-man operation.

- Bram

Guys,

Here are some comments on your toughts...

How about the storage limits on the free SoundCloud accounts?

With an optional “export to SoundCloud” for each uploaded file, it’s obviously up to each user to decide what files to export. For you who upload a lot of content, we would love to see some of it exported and showcased on SoundCloud. Then music creators can find out about Freesounds as a source for new sounds, and sound-makers can find their way into your community.

As a bonus, we can also offer all the existing Freesound users who connect to their SoundCloud accounts within a certain time-frame, 2 hours of extra storage for free. Then you could export up to 4 hours of uncompressed samples without paying.

It’s also important to point out that even though we are commercial, we’re not directly monetizing content in any way and our terms of service prevents us from start doing so. And of course the licenses still applies.

Would it also work the other way, i.e. allow us to post our SoundCloud sounds to Freesound?

As soon as a Freesound account is connected to a SoundCloud account, it’s also easy to import the files. This means a SoundCloud user can find out about Freesound, join the community and import the samples from SoundCloud to his new Freesound account.

What happens if a user changes the CC licence?

This is a general problem for CC licensing and not just related to the fact that you can change your licenses as a SoundCloud user. If a user provides a track under a certain CC license and someone uses that track, the license that was available at the time of use will still apply. So even if we prevented people from changing the license, we cannot prevent them from deleting the track and uploading it again with a different license. The same goes for Freesound content I guess.

You say embedding and sharing, but people will be able to embed and share just as well in Freesound. What is the advantage of having your things in two locations?

With a lot of developers and big investments in infrastructure and new features, we aim to have the best solutions for embedding sounds anywhere on the web. Another incentive for connecting to SoundCloud is that more and more music creation apps are connected via our API. It’s everything from sequencer apps to simple iPhone apps, and when they add features for browsing and using samples, it means that your sounds would be available for music production right away.

All the tracks exported from Freesound will be “tagged” as “uploaded from Freesound”. There is an API feature for filtering out content from a specific “app” which means you could for instance build an app for feeding all the new Freesound content on SoundCloud. Users can also search for Freesound content on SoundCloud.com and if they find samples, they will see that they come from Freesound (with a link back to your site).

There is no advantage of seeing comments/votes/... in two locations, it just makes things more difficult.

There is no voting on tracks on SoundCloud and it would be fairly easy to import the comments on SoundCloud back to the Freesound context.

SoundCloud offers no "original file download" for free account types and has number of downloads per track set to 100.

On a free account, the original file can always be downloaded up to 100 times. If that limit is reached, it’s either an incentive for the user who wants to download the track to head over to Freesound, or for the creator to pay us to get more exposure via SoundCloud. We can potentially do something to give existing Freesound users more downloads per track as well.

Finally...

It’s also worth mentioning that this is a very little development effort and therefore could be worth trying out just to see how the community in general welcomes the feature. Me and one of our developers are going to the Music Hack Day in Barcelona (1st-3rd October) and we think it’s possible to build it over the weekend to try out the feature.

Let me know if you have further questions and ideas!

Yeah, I think for Soundcloud users the benefit is that they get an extra library of sounds, which they can access directly from SC, probably with the option to easier tick boxes on FS sounds they've used in a project.
For Freesound users the benefit is they get a new audience to their sounds, so a higher chance of their sounds being used in a project, and be quite sure they'll be properly attributed.

The thing is, afaik, SC is more aimed at creators uploading their final projects and FS is more a collection of individual sounds. I would think creators would like to have easier access to sounds, the same thing is happening with images at everystockphoto, where a number of image sources are combined into one search engine, making it easier for creators to find what they're looking for.
So SC probably has more interest 'listening in' on our sounds here than we have interest in offering them our samples.
However, if it's an option per sample, those of us who don't want their sounds available on SC simply don't share it, while if there are some that do want to have their samples available on both sites might be happy to have an easy option to share it.