Freesound Forums

Hello,

I have questions related to using freesound as an education resource to teach computer science students. The basic question is to confirm that it is OK to redistribute sound clips to students and to provide caching and basic meta data operations as a separate service from freesound. Is it OK?

The longer description.

I am one of the core developer of the BRIDGES project ( http://bridgesuncc.github.io/ ) which provides all kinds of abstractions to access and visualize data and data structures. The primary target are CS college student.

We have recently added in BRIDGES support for audio clips and one of the common requests of CS instructor we work with is to bring audio clips from the web. However copyright makes us fairly worried to bundle things like interfaces to youtube or things like that. It appears to me that freesound only publishes music where redistribution in an educational context would be fine.

But I thought I'd be polite and ask anyway.

Technically what we would do is set up an intermediate server that would cache requests and sound clips to avoid bombarding freesound's system with API queries, throttle the total volume of queries to your systems to avoid driving your cost up.

Would something like that be OK?

Thank you for your time and your efforts!

Erik

Hi esaule

I'm just an average member of freesound so wouldn't dare speak for “The Management”.

With a layman's knowledge I can't see a legal objection to what you'd like to do.

But a minor point, I'm cautious about undermining the 'spirit' and nature of freesound. I for one get my reward and kicks from the positive feedback of watching the tally of downloads, knowing somebody somewhere is specifically interested in my creation. It would be a pity not to know if I'm getting further distribution from parallel servers that don't feed back to my original.

I may have misunderstood the implications of what you'd like to do, but personally I don’t think that reducing freesound server load would be worth diluting this motivational feedback. On the other hand I've no idea of the complications for your project if freesound objected and asked for all un-cached direct downloads from here.

A personal, perhaps selfish, view.

Anyway, all the best for the BRIDGES project, clearly a kindred spirit.

Wibby

Hi esaule,

Thanks for your message. Freesound's audio clips are great for your use case because the Creative Commons licenses allow fir such kind of reuse. However, you should be aware that individual sound licenses must be respected and, in your case, this mainly means providing attribution and showing the original sound license to your users (e.g. put a link to the original sound page). If in your system you have no way to provide that attribution, then I'd suggest you to filter all your queries to CC0 sounds only (which do not require attribution), and are 50% of Freesound.

About caching, what Freesound/Freesound API terms of use do not allow is to redistribute the sounds to create a Freesound alternative which replicates its functionality. Your case is different and the caching strategy to save # queries and bandwidth on our side I think it is perfectly legit.

It would be nice the add an entry for your project here: https://labs.freesound.org could you send me a couple of paragraphs and relevant screenshot once Freesound integration is ready? (you can do that via private FS message)

@strangely_gnarled I think we were writing at the same time I think proper attribution should alleviate your understandable concern and is the way to possibly get feedback from people "browsing Freesound" from external sites.

Hahaahaha, thanks for the thoughts frederic.

Actually I'm not concerned about the attribution thing at all, especially from Erik's project.

Purely from a self-centered perspective, freesound is small part of my life but when I drink my first cup of coffee every the morning I'm logged on to see if I've had any more downloads. I really enjoy that first cup and any extra downloads are just a bonus. I'm never going to hit the sky-high numbers of the best sounds, and I'm not a competitive person anyway, but little things please me. Hope i didn't sound like I thought the world was ending.

keep up the good work and stay safe.

Wibby.

(Sorry to dilute your thread Erik,)

We'll meditate internally on these points about licence and providing feedback.

For adding a link on the labs page, we will definitely do that!

We'll point to freesound in all place that are appropriate in our documentations and tool.

We'll work on the integration, the work is student-driven so it could take a while depending on their classload. And we may come back to you with technical questions.

In any case thanks for your time and your work!