General
- Upload only high-quality sounds, great music loops or sound art. Soundsnap is a community only for high-quality material and not for amateurish recordings.
- The filename should be appropriate and descriptive. Naming a file is useful to people that use it in their productions, but also it helps the sound being found through search.
- Make sure that the sound is properly processed and edited. If it is a loop, it should loop correctly and if it is a recording, it shouldn't have much unnecessary silence.
Categories
There are 16 main categories and those have around 8 to 10 subcategories each. You have to select both a main and a subcategory for each sound. You do that from the chained menu, first selecting the main category, and then the sub category.
How to describe sounds?
Try to describe sounds as well as possible, so they can easily be found by other users.
Things to think about usually include:
a) the source of the sound
b) what we can hear- what the recording consists of in detail
c) the location where it was recorded
d) What gear or instruments were used
What are tags?
Tags are keywords used to categorize and identify sounds. The main difference between tags and categories is that tags are created by YOU, the user. Therefore, you can choose what tags are more important for a sound for it to be found by others.
Here a few tips for better tagging:
- If there is an American and English word that you know that means the same, it would be nice to include both. Typical examples are mobile/cellphone, garbage/rubbish, shopping center/mall, etc.. Also, enter words that use different spellings, for example airplane/aeroplane, analog/analogue etc.
- Also, using different versions of the same word often helps. For example, 'drink, drinking' or 'scream, screaming'. You should enter both, because people might enter either word as a search term.
- The same stands for synonyms or similar words such as: ambient/ambience, woman/female, impact/hit/drop etc.
- In certain cases, you can add descriptive adjectives such as: dreamy, aggressive, irritating, anthemic, playful, innocent etc. Other words, such as 'dream', 'fear', 'meditation' etc could be suitable for atmospheres or musical samples.
Music samples and loops:
- Music Loops and Music Samples (single) are two of the most popular categories. One is for loops/phrases- 'Music Loops', and one for single sounds and chords 'Music Samples (single)'. For example, a reggae bassline loop, would go under the category 'Music Loops' and the subcategory 'Reggae/Dub', while a single bass note, would go under the category 'Music Samples (single) and the subcategory 'bass/guitar'.
- In the case of music loops, its very useful for users to know the exact bpm of a loop, if this is known. We recommend the following format: '125 bpm', with a space between the number and 'bpm', and not '125bpm' or '125, bpm'.
- Another important tag for music loops and samples is the key or note it is in. If a single note is in 'A', then you should put 'A' as a tag. If it is in 'A major', put the tag in the format 'A major' etc.
