Freesound Forums

I found this really cool website a couple of months ago, decided to upload some of my own sounds, but, thinking about it, I wonder if my activity really feats Freesound's philosophy...

Exactly : almost one year ago, I began a website proposing sounds to upload, all of them public domain.

As my main interest is in making the sound of animated movies, most of them are ZIP files of different kinds of zwwwip, glop, whatever, but also some ambiences.

The files I decided to upload on Freesounds are ambiences. Most of them are already on my website. In the near future, I'd like to upload here more "personnal", more "sound gleaning" sounds, as I consider it as an art by itself (I'm not saying I'm good in it, just that I try to improve as my hears allow me to...).

Since september, I decided that it would be good to make some money with all those sounds, so I added a Paypal button to make donations, with the explicit reward of a DVD-Rom with all the sounds I have, most of them already on my website, but uncompressed.

Now is my moral problem, and I'd like to have other "sound gleaner's" opinion on it : basically, it's as if I was using Freesound as an advertisment for my DVD-Rom... I wonder f it's really the philosophy of this website...

But I need to find a way to make some money, mostly because my wife wouldn't stand another 1300 € bill on sound hardware ...

(That one might speak to a lot of you guys ...) :wink:

So, here are my two options :

- I should upload here only files that are not already on my website (that would be sad, because I wouldn't post all the ambiences I have, just to keep some chances for me)
- I should upload less compressed files (sounds tricky)
- I should upload uncompressed files, but shorter than those I have on the DVD (ex: one minute of river here, 5 minutes on the DVD)
- I should upload all my compressed ambiences here, and put a link from my website to my profile here, so that the user would have an opportunity to discover the Freesound project (sound the best option ?)
- I shouldn't worry and continue like that, because after all, I only made 60€ in 4 months !

So, what do you think ? Having another idea ?

(Sorry for my English, it's my Wisconsinite wife who teaches me !)

The sounds you make are yours to decide what to do with.

If you post sounds on here, as long as you're letting people freely use them under the license their put under this site that is fine. Sounds featured on this site people have to credit to you.

Maybe you could make it so that people who pay on your site can use your sounds royalty free where they don't have to credit you or pay further royalties then whatever they paid to get your sounds. That could be a way of distinguishing fairly between the two. Some people really would rather use sounds without crediting at all, so if they pay a little fee you charge that might be a fair balance. If you go this route don't state that the files are public domain if you want people to credit or purchase them, because this could confuse some people thinking your sounds are free to use without payment or crediting you.(I hope that made sense) I think it would be kind of unfair though to say files that you've posted as public domain are no longer public domain though. YOu could always ask for donations for releasing these samples as public domain samples though. And for new files you could make some that are buyout royalty free files and for ones you feel like putting on freesound, as ones that have to be credited and follow the sampling+ license.

Ultimately the sounds are yours. People will be grateful for whatever you offer on Freesound even if you charge for different versions at your own site.

Hope some of these ideas help.

The royalty free paid download/sample CD is an excellent idea soundhead... I proposed something similar for freesound itself not too long ago.

It's totally fine to use freesound as a promotional vehicle, as Andrew Duke and others do. We even have a whole forum dedicated to showing off works made with freesound.