freesound. https //freesound.org/ Login : How to Download Sounds from freesound.org

Freesound @ freesound.org aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse. Freesound provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to:

• browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a “sounds-like” type of browsing and more
• upload and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
• interact with fellow sound-artists!

We also hope to develop a public sound archive for use in academic studies. In order to properly test their algorithms, many audio research institutions struggle to locate audio that is properly licenced. Many people have raised this issue, but no one has offered a satisfactory answer.

What do I need to do to legally use the files on freesound?

You can Login to Freesound by visiting the page freesound.org/login.

Well, it depends on what you want to do and which files you want to use. First of all, freesound lets the user select one of three licenses for their sounds. And, we used to have a 4th license, which complicates matters. Depending on the license there are things you can and can’t do with the files. Let’s start with the licenses. Creative commons has a really nice page explaining them:

• zero (cc0): http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• attribution (by): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• attribution noncommercial (by-nc): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

How do I credit/attribute?

Crediting people is easy, just say something like this:

This uses these sounds from freesound:
"sound1" by user1 ( http://freesound.org/s/soundID/ ) licensed under CCBYNC 4.0
"sound2", "sound3" by user2 ( http://freesound.org/people/user2/ ) licensed under CCBY 4.0
etc..

If you have a particularly long list of files or very little space to attribute sounds you can always do:

This uses many sounds from freesound,
for the full list see here: http://www.mysite.com/work-credits.html

Have you activated your account? http://www.freesound.org/home/reactivate/

How do I download a sound?

To download a sound, first make sure you are logged into your registered account. Then, navigate to a sound’s full description page by clicking on the title of the sound on either the search results list or any link on the site. Example of this page: https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/406900/

On that web page you will find a big yellow download button on the right-hand side of the screen. Click on this button and your download should begin. If that doesn’t start downloading the file, but instead takes you to another page with a streaming player, you might have to Right-click on the download button and select “save target as” or “save link as” depending on your browser. Do this for each sound you want to download.

How do I delete a sound?

On the “edit” page of a sound you will find a sound deletion link, at the very bottom of the page… You can find the edit page by looking for the link called “Edit sound information” on the single sound view page.

This file has a weird format (flac?? ogg??), how can I play/open/convert it on my computer?

Freesound support 4 formats at freesound:

• mp3 is mpeg 2, layer III. We don’t really need to explain this 🙂
• FLAC (.flac or .fla) is the Free Lossless Audio Codec, an open-source compression scheme that can cut the size of an audio file in half (on average) while not losing any quality in the process. It’s basically ZIP for audio files. Using FLAC is good for Freesound because it saves on disk space and bandwidth usage, reduces download times, but doesn’t degrade the quality of the sample like mp3 or another lossy codec would.
• Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) is an open-source lossy audio codec comparable to modern AAC Audio (as used in the iTunes store, etc.). It does degrade the quality of the sample somewhat in order to save on space, but it is much more efficient at this than an older format like mp3. An Ogg file can have the same quality as an mp3 file using less space, or better quality using the same space.
• AIFF/WAV (.aiff or .aif/.wav) are both uncompressed audio formats. Files in this format are considered by some to be easier to work with because there is no extra conversion step in most cases. However, this comes at the price of a much larger file.