https://www.pianobook.co.uk/ has hundreds of no-charge sample libraries (many pianos, lots of other things). The most common format is for Kontakt (non-libre, but available for Windows & macOS at no cost). There's quite a few in DecentSampler format and a few SFZ. It's not hard to extract the audio files from any of them if you need to.
At one point in time, Ardour (x-platform, FLOSS DAW) let you directly search and download from Freesound within the program.
We stopped doing that when their authentication API changed. They've subsequently changed it to something that would allow the functionality to be restored, but nobody has found the time to do that yet.
https://github.com/ffont/FreesoundSimpleSampler - demonstrates the use of the freesound-juce API client; the user can create a textual query to Freesound.org and 16 random sounds are loaded in a sampler.
As a freelance rerecording mixer I regularily used sounds from freesound and felt it was my duty to contribute with sounds I couldn't find. I still get notifications once or twice a week about some sound being used in a game or a film.
I was watching some kid from Germany go into how he creates the sound track for his youtube videos. And quickly realized I underestimated the effort it takes to make youtube video. What seemed like a simple video, had a 15 layer sound track. Some people spend more time on editing the sounds than the video.
Here he explains how he does it if anyone is interested.
Yeah but what's scary is Youtube's automatic copyright strikes. I was watching this video where a guy created a soundtrack using samples from a site like freesound (the whole video was actually about making your own Youtube tracks) and as soon the video uploaded.. boom 5 minutes later he gets a copyright strike. He said in the video it happens a lot when you use freely available samples since the algorithm often confuses it. It was sometime back so I don't have the link right now but uploading Youtube and getting copyright notices sounds fucking scary that I wouldn't want do it at all.
Part of the reason (perhaps the whole reason) for that is that there's a cohort of people who upload commercial sounds to freesound for some reason. Extremely annoying.
I’m vaguely reminded of when I was charged with adding sounds to a Java applet game. As a joke I added a five minute sequence of “dying” sounds I found online somewhere. Each death scream was separated with about a second of silence. It was a beautifully comic effect as it just kept going on and on and on. We were tempted to shift it as an Easter egg but it dramatically increased the size of the applet and this was the days of most people accessing the internet via dialup.
Fun story, I uploaded some recordings of the family dog playing a very rough-sounding game of tug-of-war with me. I got a bunch of great growls and snarls from it, and they are uploaded to Freesound.
She's since passed, I think those are my only audio recordings of her.
That appears to be one person publishing their music under CC-BY. That's nice of them, but not similar to Freesound's massive collection.
I think http://www.ccmixter.org/ would be a more likely candidate, or SoundCloud's search restricted to CC licenses. There are also lots of musicians publishing CC music on Bandcamp, but the site doesn't allow filtering by license. The best approximation I've found is searching "some rights reserved" site:bandcamp.com with DDG and then checking which license the link points to.
I don't think this issue is specific to freesound but has anyone ever figured out a way to make sounds easy to find? I guess ML might help if could take what's in the sounds (people do that too but they are often wrong or motivated to use false tags). I find finding good and appropriate sounds the hardest part.
Hi, I'm another researcher at the Music Technology Group, which runs Freesound. Definitely, this one of our long-time challenges.
Facilitating search and exploration is one of our main research directions related to Freesound. We do audio ML research, in particular, audio-based auto-tagging (see the already mentioned Freesound Datasets https://annotator.freesound.org/fsd/ we've built for this purpose) but also similarity and clustering based on audio analysis and tags.
So far, Freesound API provides similarity search and audio analysis features.
We've come a long way since sounds.sdsu.edu, both in terms of the volume of sound files publicly on the internet and in terms of the legal protection of users against copyright.
Still, there was something magical about downloading that first copy of Tori Amos's Crucify as a 64-kbps .au file, that seems to be missing from today's internet...
Whatever the main commercial sound effect database is, it's not big enough, because I am always hearing the same sounds and it's uncanny. For example, I think a Camel in John Wick 3 makes the same sound as in Age of Empiress 2.
And how many of those are correctly licensed? I already found one that directly mentioned that it was ripped from a YouTube video and if this is in any way like free 3d model collections it will be stuffed with assets ripped from commercial games.
I don't know if the maintainers of Freesound are around, but this file https://freesound.org/media/html_player/img/icon_background.... is loaded every couple miliseconds when the audio file plays, resulting in tens of thousands of image loads per page.
Interesting, thanks for the report. I can't see this behaviour when testing myself. Do you mean that there is a network load of the file every few milliseconds, or that the file disappears and reappears in the DOM? From what I can tell, this file is added with static CSS, so it shouldn't be reloading all the time. Are you playing from the search results page, or a sound page? Bug reports are welcome: https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues
Very good project, all sounds in our app use resources taken from this site. It has very good search function that crucially allows you too specify license.
Good stuff. I use freesound from time to time. Their download speeds could be better, though. I see no reason why their can't provide a torrent link for every song.
Huh, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t there when I read the article. I recall seeing only the “Home” link (and I did a Ctrl+F on the HTML and didn’t see any links that went outside the blog sub domain except for on a user comment at the bottom of the page).
We also maintain Freesound labs, which lists a lot of projects and research made using content from freesound: https://labs.freesound.org/
FSD50k is our hand-curated dataset of sounds designed for research in sound and event recognition tasks https://zenodo.org/record/4060432#.X3xrgi8RqL4, http://dcase.community/challenge2019/task-audio-tagging