Freesound.org is an online collaborative sound database where people from different disciplines share recorded sound clips under Creative Commons licenses. Freesound’s goal is to give support to sound researchers, who often have trouble finding large royalty-free sound databases to test their algorithms, and to sound artists, who use pre-recorded sounds in their pieces. There is a highly engaged community of users continuously contributing to the site, not only uploading sounds but also commenting, rating and discussing in the forums about relevant topics for the community.
Nine years since its inception, Freesound has become one of the most popular sites for sharing sound snippets (46,000 unique visits per day, more than two million registered users, and more than 200,000 uploaded sounds). According to the statistics of online tool hostcabi.net, the value of Freesound as calculated by unique daily visitors and daily generated revenue corresponds to ~$99,000 USD. Awards won by Freesound include the ‘Ciutat de Barcelona’ prize for best multimedia initiative (2005), BMW award2 2009, Grant by Letusa to buy new hardware, Google research award (both 2008 and 2009) and the EngageU3 Awards (2012, through Freesound’s spin-off activity ‘Sons de Barcelona’). Freesound is also being used in the industry, including Samplecount’s hearhear.me technology.
Freesound.org currently provides a standards-based API for interacting with the database via HTTP – this includes the use of content-based descriptors provided by Essentia. The API documentation can be found at: http://www.freesound.org/docs/api/
Freesound homepage: http://www.freesound.org