Freesound Forums

This is a thread to discuss potential issues and improvements of the newly introduced bulk sound description feature. Before posting here make sure that you have read the bulk describe instructions in the FAQ page.

For the record: I opened this thread some weeks ago with a title like "Secret thread" and saying that this will be used to discuss potential issues and improvements of a feature that's coming. That's why the first answers by @Headphaze and @strangely_gnarled talk about mistety and excitement

ooh I love a good mystery!

frederic.font wrote:
.... potential issues and improvements of a feature that's coming...

Biting fingernails. Difficult when fingers crossed and jumping up and down with excitement.

Ouch! Bit my lip and drew blood... should have recorded that.

Seems mighty slow right now. Uploaded eight files as a test. Uploaded CSV file. It's been "Validating data file 'G50.csv'" for 20 minutes now. Page refreshes (reloads?) every few seconds. There are only 56 fields in the CSV file (8 rows times 7 columns). Am I stuck in some sort of loop? Internet is quite solid here, so I don't think it's that. Dunno.

craigsmith wrote:
Seems mighty slow right now. Uploaded eight files as a test. Uploaded CSV file. It's been "Validating data file 'G50.csv'" for 20 minutes now. Page refreshes (reloads?) every few seconds. There are only 56 fields in the CSV file (8 rows times 7 columns). Am I stuck in some sort of loop? Internet is quite solid here, so I don't think it's that. Dunno.

BTW, Does the "Bulk description of files" page have to stay open in order to process the metadata? It continuously updates, but all the files have already been uploaded, so I don't know why it would need the local browser window in order to function. But I hesitate to close it.

Am I the 1st one to actually try this feature? Give me some tips & feedback, folks!

--c

Hi,

This looks like some bug. Validation can take up to a minute or so if the file contains many sounds. This is not your case, should be almost immediate. Either you made a CSV file that's causing problems or our CSV processing process is not responding for some reason. We successfully uploaded sounds using this feature when it was released and it worked as expected, but other people don't seem to have tried it yet so there might sill be some bugs out there. I'll send you a private message so you can share the CSV with me and I'll further investigate.

Thanks for reporting and for using the feature!

Okay, it works now!

I definitely wasn't processing when I first tried it. Frederic messaged me privately & said he restarted the process.

This time when I tried, I got a helpful error message that lead me to the realization that I did not have a column for "name". I did that because the instructions say "name (optional)". But the column is _not_ optional -- it must still be there with a "name" header to be valid. So all CSV files _must_ have eight columns. (Maybe the word "optional" should be removed from the instructions.)

Thanks so much for helping with this Frederic. I am happy.

I have been using Soundly to create metadata for my files. Soundly can output CSV files, so this will be huge time saver for me.

--Craig

The audio part is recorded in DAW. The video part in DSLR and stored to CF cards within the camera. I highly recommend you making a list of all the shots you want to do before you start shooting. If you want to details about this problem then you can go to netgear arlo support, you get steps wise solution.

Hi.
No success with the upload here.
The "validating data" page is refreshing itself every few seconds but only to show the eternal animated ring again. I tried XLS and CSV and XLSX. With the XLS it stayed like this for over an hour. The list contains 15 files. The button "Delete this and upload a new one" doesn't work.
I tried 4 different files. Two were saved with WPS Spreadsheets (XLS and CSV), the other two with Google Spreadsheets (XLSX and another CSV). The browser I'm using is Firefox.
Best,
J.

Hi there,
It's been 2 months since I posted this, so I decided to take it back up on the list of threads. I'd still love to contribute to freesound in batch!
Best New Year wishes!

It sounds like maybe the process that does the bulk processing may have crashed. I don't know for sure -- I'm a user, not a programmer or admin. But I had a similar problem at first. It either works quickly or not all. You might write directly to frederic.font (https://freesound.org/people/frederic.font/). He got it going for me.

And, stating the obvious, the spreadsheet needs to be perfect. I settled on csv files because they're the simplest. I'll email you one if you like, to compare to yours.

Good luck.

Hi Craig,
Thank you very much for your reply and sorry for the delay on my part this time. I've got some more free time again so I'm getting back to supplying some new effects to freesound.
I'll definitely appreciate you sending me you CSV! It sounds like it may get me closer to solving this.
Thank you!
J.

I put one of my csv files on Google Drive. I zipped it so that Google Sheets wouldn't try to open it. You can download it at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bEi76UOZiIrGC8YrDMRcPBki91eW0VuB/view?usp=sharing

The Freesound robot is super-picky about every character. When it's working, though, it gives pretty good feedback when there's an error. You might want to just use mine as a template.

Let me know if this helps.

--c

Suggestion: When downloading the "template" csv, and option is available to auto-import the audio file name on the template for quicker upload.

Thank you for the awesome platform. Hopefully this is a good suggestion.

I'm trying to upload 21 sounds using bulk upload on Firefox browser on Windows 10. After uploading the XLS, the page repeatedly reloads with confirmation for form resubmission. The progress stays at 0%.

Anyone stuck at validating a data file? I have tried to tinker around with the csv formatting, including adding/removing quotation marks, etc. It seemed to work fine before, so it may be user-error on my part.

Hi,
So the problem is that files does not validate ok, or it stays validating indifenitely?

Hi thanks - it stays validating indefinitely. It seems to refresh the page every few seconds. Tried with Firefox and Chrome.

I tried to leave it to run for just over an hour, but it did not seem to go through (I am trying to describe 10 sounds).

Screenshot:
https://imgur.com/AUF8hbf

Example lines on CSV:
audio_filename,name,tags,geotag,description,license,pack_name,is_explicit
dark_ambient-001.wav,,drone deep void darkness isolation,"51.38928, 30.09948, 18",layered dark ambient drones,Creative Commons 0,dark_ambient,0

Hi,
There was a bug that I just fixed, if you reload the page not it hopefully should be ok. Let me know!

It works, hooray! Thank you Frederic