Freesound Forums

Hello all, I'm new to this site, but very glad I have found it. I believe it to be a fantastic project, and I intend to help where I can. I have am a full time sound designer, having exhibited several times in London at The Whitechapel Art Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, The Soho Theatre, and in FXpansion music software... but enough blowing my own horn.

I think the site here really is tremendous - I'm sick of people charging for sounds, and am glad there is a public resource. I think it is important for society to pool its art, tools, and knowledge for the advancement and development of our culture in a positive direction. However...

I have one issue I believe to be very serious - the quality of recordings.

I am fully aware that one of the aims of this site must be to get people recording sounds, and making them active in recording for themselves, and this means that most recording will not be of a proffesional quality. This is understandable, and part of the site philosophy. (it also means there is some great crazy stuff!)

However, some of the mp3 encoding qualities are so low, that little meaningful sound can be interpreted from the file, much less the files being useable. For example:

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=17543

Is there no call for minimum encoding rates? I believe the library would be more attractive to potential users if at least we were able to have a near zero percentage of 'encoding distortion' files, such as the above.

Please tell me what you all think, and I would love to know the organisers thoughts on this matter. Is this a subject that has come up before?

I look forward to contributing and downloading.

Many thanks and much respect to the organisers and participants

ummmmm ... that one's a WAV

Its part of a competition entry. Patchen is showing us hir intepretation of Fire.....its Art

Maybe Competion entries should be tagged "Competion1" or something...but it does say "This sample is part of a sample pack: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water Competition entry"

Its not supposed to be a high quality sound sample... or so I thought.

He’s using the above as an example of a good quality recording

"near zero percentage of 'encoding distortion' files, such as the above."

High quality portable sound recording equipment is not cheap. Most people who are going to invest in expensive recording equipment will not give away their samples for free.

I was just having a conversation with patchen, the creator of your example file, about quality issue of portable recoding equipment. For this site's purpose I don't think quality control, in respect to distortion or noise in a file should be implemented.Though most of my competition entries are pretty high fidelity/low noise.

The one thing I'll say in defense of MP3s and other forms of compression is that not everyone has a high-speed connection or a computer designed to handle large wav files. Maybe it's more democratic to have some compressed offerings.

Walter,
Did you actually download the sound, or just listen to the preview? The previews are HEAVILY file compressed. It is true that my fire recording has some issues, but that is because the source was very harmonically complex in the higher frequencies. I recorded at 16bit 44.1, and no compression
or encoding was used at any point in the recording, editing or uploading to freesound. The distortion is more a matter of my Microphone and/or AD converters not being able to handle the complex nature of the sound.
In defense of the new generation of Hi-Md recorders though, the conveters are better than many budjet devices, and way better than the datwalkmans of yore. I compared the Hi-Md converters to the edirol R1 and the MD was miles ahead (and the R1 was recording at 24bit) I also compared the MD converters with My Tascam DM24 recording at 24bit and I chose the MD recordings of the same material at 16bit as having better imaging. Now, the tascam is no slouch for a budjet device either, in my tests it has trounced the Presonos Firebox, and the m-audio delta66 in terms of converter quality. No it's not an Apogee, but the converters are not to bad either, so if I choose the minidisc recording over it, I think I'm in good company for a $300 dollar device. :wink:

Walter_Odington
Is this a subject that has come up before?

Most people here including me share your concern about quality, but for a number of reasons I wouldn't say no to a sample even if far from perfect. Think constructively: if you find a 'poor' or (even worst) a 'nothing', just upload a couple 'goods'. This approach will surely bring equilibrium back to our Yin-Yan universe :wink:

And so the debate shifts....

In the blue corner, the untouchables! more pure than thou! the experts themselves, geniuses of sound! "snobs? nous?".......and in the red corner, the sample whores, the freaks, the mash up terrorists ....they'll take your beautiful recording of a rare anorexic budgie in the tropics and twist it into the bassline for their murdercore remix of "Vomiting Grandmother" (web release only!)

ding ding, round one...........

I did only listen in preview mode ops: The wav is beatiful! my apologies

As for high quality recording being given away for free, I hear so much dross being sold for much that I want raw sounds to be available to all! Obviously, most (including myself) probably keep their favourites witheld for personnel use - but one mans trash is anothers treasure.

And in resopnse to Harri: I stand for high quality encoding, not recording nazism Like I said before, I dont think recording quality should (or can) be moderated, but I think mp3 should be of a reasonable bit rate. However, I was wrong about the sample I cited, so maybe most of the sound here are at a good quality, and free of the horrid high frequency mp3 worms wriggling around the basilar

Right then, I have some uploading to do

harri
And so the debate shifts....

In the blue corner, the untouchables! more pure than thou! the experts themselves, geniuses of sound! "snobs? nous?".......and in the red corner, the sample whores, the freaks, the mash up terrorists ....they'll take your beautiful recording of a rare anorexic budgie in the tropics and twist it into the bassline for their murdercore remix of "Vomiting Grandmother" (web release only!)

ding ding, round one...........

Could you please make mine an MP3 at 256 kbps stereo, Harri? Granny would've been so proud! (She actually dug artifacts, said it was the digital age's way of "keepin' it real."

I've found that mp3's have the worst stereo coupling of any compression codec. OGG VORBIS files, while not as convieniant, sound very nice for the compression you get. I would try to discourage MP3s from being used at all if anybody would listen, go with FLAC-lossless and cross platform or OGG- best of the lossy codecs or straigh wav/aiff. :wink:

Don't forget the old maxim, "beggars can't be choosers." :wink:

( technical bit: the PREVIEW mp3's are low quality to 1) save space 2) save bandwidth 3) they're mp3 'cos flash doesn't understand ogg/flac/... 4) people have to able to play the streaming or quasi-streaming on dial-up )

I'm all pro high quality, and if bitrates are low, people get an automatic visual feedback on this.
But, low quality sound is (sometimes) better than no sound.

- bram, back from vacation

Well, actually, we have a great mechanism for quality control only it hasn't been used enough: the community can moderate itself through comments and ratings.
Although I feel there is a total inbalance between voting/commenting and downloading it has been getting better lately. There are about 30-40 comments every day (a quick and dirty look through the weekend log so by no means scientific).
I should say that right now its not possible to sort search results based on their rating, which i think is a shame (bram you lazy bastard go fix this )

I actually like lo-fi sounds . Good for noise music. Also, you find stuff in "bad recordings". Background noise is the best even.

I do appreciate hi quality, but I must agree with RandomInsult that lofi sounds are extremely interesting and useful. So, it is not bad they are included in this website, at least there are some people who like it.

Absolutely. One man's trash is anothers treasure.

I must say, in the past months I haven't been on this site ops: not only the quantity of recordings has improved , but also the quality.
I feel this site has improved massively over the past year.

My respect to the contibuters.

And I'll try to be more of a productive member in the future.... ops:

(also on these discussions ...hehehe. don't actually have a clear opinion on thsi issue yet!)

Well, I'm glad about two things:

1) The quality of sounds is better than I first thought, due to my own error and no one elses. There are indeed many good sounds (a few duff ones, but without darkness there is no light )

2) The quality of response and discourse from the forum members. It would have been easy to descend into some form of non-discussion, but I am pleased to see a good standard of communication... from most posters

I'm certainly glad to have found this place, long may it prosper. I intend to do my bit

a tag for lofi or hi fi would be useful when searching