Freesound Forums

Hi everyone,

As you will know, we've recently put a lot of effort in advancing the development of the new Freesound UI. Many of you have provided great feedback and we have incorporated a lot of your suggestions in the the new design. There are however two things for which we should make a decision and we think it is a great idea to involve anyone interested in making that decision. These two things have been mentioned in the main new UI feedback thread. If you're interested in providing your opinion, please keep reading and follow the instructions. Also feel free to discuss about these aspects in this thread.

A) Using spectrograms VS using waveforms by default

The current version of Freesound uses sound waveform images in sound players. With the new UI, you can choose to use spectrograms instead of waveforms by default. A spectrogram conveys more information about a sound, but it might be less intuitive to understand than a waveform. You can try both options live in Freesound by toggling the "Show spectrograms in sound players by default" option in the "account settings" page of the new Freesound UI.

* Example of spectrograms: https://ibb.co/851gBG9
* Example of waveforms: https://ibb.co/Ns5BbXV

So my question is: should Freesound sound players use spectrograms by default?
Please share your opinion through this poll: https://strawpoll.com/polls/6QnMOpldkZe

B) Show play buttons VS hide play buttons in sound players

In the new Freesound UI, the "play" and "loop" buttons of sound players are only visible when hovering with the mouse over the player's image (both in waveform and spectrogram modes). This is like that because the pages look "cleaner" without all the play buttons. However, some users mentioned that this might be confusing as it is not clear where you have to click to play a sound.

Here are examples of combinations of spectrogram/waveform and play/no play button:
* Spectrogram + play button: https://ibb.co/stRwQ8m
* Spectrogram + no play button: https://ibb.co/GW7Tnbv
* Waveform + play button: https://ibb.co/G5BjmPV
* Waveform + no play button: https://ibb.co/5T7YPDP

So my quesiton is: should the "play" button be always visible in Freesound sound players?
Please share your opinion through this poll: https://strawpoll.com/polls/eJnvv4JlWnv

Hi,

Thanks those who voted!

It looks like there is some agreement regarding B) and most users prefer to have the play buttons visible (even though there were not many votes). I'll make the play buttons visible

About A), there seems to be no clear preference and both spectrograms and waveforms are good options. However, there is one strong argument supporting waveforms which is that spectrogram files weight on average 3 times more than spectrogram files. This is mostly because many pixels in waveform images are "empty". Using spectrograms would therefore mean more data transferred by our servers and slower page loads. Therefore, we'll keep waveforms for now.