Freesound Forums

With the ever increasing number of sounds I think we need some way of making the best exemplars of each tag category rise to the top of a search list.

Some ideas...

1. Rating tags. That is users can rate how well a tag fits or describes the sound.
2. Sort by rating (tag, sound, or combination) options.
3. Synthetic or acoustic recording categories (we should be able to tag sounds as field-recordings or synthesized/processed).

I have a problem now that when I search for something like wind, I get a bunch of synthesized sounds. It would be nice to filter searches.

digifish

"Advanced search hints

By adding a minus sign before a term you can find results without that term. For example "apple -pear" finds sounds with "apple", but not "pear" in the description. "

That's one way you could make it work of course that won't help if they don't have the word synth in there.

An alternative to search is bringing up the sample pack list and punching in a keyword with the edit > find function.

Those are good ideas. I think you can actually remove tags from sounds if your logged in.(I could see that getting abusive but never tried it so don't know how it works) Some sounds do seem to have a ridiculous amount of irrelevant tags on them though.

soundhead
"Advanced search hints

By adding a minus sign before a term you can find results without that term. For example "apple -pear" finds sounds with "apple", but not "pear" in the description. "

That's one way you could make it work of course that won't help if they don't have the word synth in there.

An alternative to search is bringing up the sample pack list and punching in a keyword with the edit > find function.

Those are good ideas. I think you can actually remove tags from sounds if your logged in.(I could see that getting abusive but never tried it so don't know how it works) Some sounds do seem to have a ridiculous amount of irrelevant tags on them though.

Yes I have only ever added tags, would be nicer if we could simply agree or disagree with tags

digifish

Yes I have only ever added tags, would be nicer if we could simply agree or disagree with tags

digifish

I think that would be a programming nightmare, and designing a usable interface would be difficult. But maybe not. Bram could speak better to this aspect.

However, because of your article, I will put "synth" in anything that is synthesized, 'actual natural "field recording"' in anything that is a field recorded, and "remix" in anything remixed. I hadn't even thought of this issue until you brought it up.

Maybe the upload process could be altered to require the checking of these categories before it can be listed. That would ensure that a search would always have the tags to act on ( for new uploads anyway). Not as comprehensive as your solution, but easier to implement.

synth or field recorded
raw or edited (by the original poster)
primary or remix/derivative

I have noticed it is difficult to find sounds in common categories. The number of hits is so high it is impractical to vet them all. So I've started to use the random sample feature a lot. Discovered some gems that way.