I belong to this site called Freesound, a kind of YouTube for sound files. It was originally built for the 2005 International Computer Music Conference, and with that sort of background, I was expecting something solid and worthwhile that experimental music types could use. You know, field recordings done with boom mikes, while sitting out in the heather next to a reel-to-reel tape recorder eating chutney and ham and chicken sandwich. Crumbs getting caught up in thick black whiskers. Dark green anorak. That sort of thing.
But simple probability dictates that a site anyone can join will inevitably be dragged down to the level of the lowest common denominator. Sure enough, 18 months after its launch Freesound has become the preserve of morons who submit thousands of worthless samples of things like incoherent shouting, unfunny quips made by synthetic computer voices, boring pro-tools'd drum loops and low quality mp3s of some unintelligible ambience recorded outside a backpackers' hostel in Nepal. So not to put a finer point on it, I think Freesound sucks.
Admittedly there are a lot of people there adding legitimate and useful field recordings, (confoundingly, some of them are the same ones submitting dross) but good luck finding them. Freesound uses trendy tagging and 'folksonomies' to give users control over how samples are classified. Because users are inherently subjective in their classification of sounds, it's impossible to find what you want without having to wade impatiently through irrelevant crap.
You may be wondering why the useless samples don't just get weeded out. As you may have already guessed from the use of folksonomic tagging, Freesound is run under a drippy Web 2.0, "Different strokes for different folks" ethos. Thus Freesound ends up mired in rubbish.
With regards to Web 2.0, in five years' time the web community will look back, laugh and say "What were we thinking?". This won't be much help to Freesound of course, as the site eventually chokes on its bad information architecture and even worse samples, and users give up in droves.
It has been argued on the Freesound forum that all of its sounds can be useful, even if only one user downloads them. But how many users are you prepared to put off in order to host the sort of sounds that only one person will want to download?
Do I have a solution? Well, perhaps a better model for Freesound is that used for open source software development, where anyone can contribute code, but there is a designated maintainer who has ultimate say over what's in or out. It may not be democratic, but I think some quality control is better than none.
Anyway, I've had enough of Freesound, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Posted by stuart at December 9, 2006 3:14 PM