Freesound Forums
Category and Subcategory not used for search (you have to put in the same words into tags still)
Started June 24th, 2025 · 2 replies · Latest reply by alastairp 3 months, 1 week ago
It seems reasonable to think "if I select the music category, surely I don't need to write 'music' in the tags any more" and people searching for 'music' will be able to find the sound. Unfortunately(?) it doesn't work that way. Category/Subcategory are not used in text search.
Example: irishtokia.wav (cc0) by aloscos is categorized as Music > Solo instrument.
Searching the user's files for the title does find the sound. Searching for title and 'music' does not find the sound. Same for 'instrument'.
Above example is one of the oldest files on Freesound. It is probably automatically categorized. As a more recent example with manually selected category, Upset Bird cannot be found when "Animals" is added to the text search.
Not sure whether this is a bug or a feature but something to be aware of.
At the moment we're not doing anything with this category other than showing it on the sound page. I like the suggestion of also searching the category name when performing a search, I'll open an issue for it and we'll discuss it.
Note that it appears to be able to perform a search filtering within a category - for example If you go to the search page with no search term, then you click "Music" under the category list. You can then perform a search within this category, e.g.
https://freesound.org/search/?q=+irishtokia.wav&f=category%253A%2522Music%2522
I see that if I search for "irishtokia" then the category list doesn't appear in the sidebar: https://freesound.org/search/?q=irishtokia
And I also see a few other bugs around how we interact with this filter. I'll open an issue to resolve them