As you probably read in news sites, or in this post, we have been bringing many high quality sounds for free to the community lately.

However, this brings us in a position that we have to preserve the quality of the library with even greater care than before. I have two ideas in order to do that:

- 1) To allow sounds only after administration. Up until now low quality sounds have been deleted after being uploaded, which is worse for the uploader and for downloaders. Administration would require myself and/or other members of the community to 'approve' the sounds before being published. That would mean disapproving sounds that are not properly recorded/edited and don't have proper descriptions and tagging.

Criteria are going to be a bit subjective, but thats how it always is. Feedback can be provided via email in order for users to know what they can do to improve.

- 2) To enable a 'user feedback' feature, similar to Ebay's system. This would essentially be a 'user rating', instead of a sound rating. Up until now, the rating system for sounds hasn't been very successful. There are simply too many sounds and too little time- most people never rate sounds and thats the reality.

By having a 'user feedback' system, people will be able to rate users so that a professional sound designer has a better 'score' than a young student thats just starting out. We can then create an algorithm so that their sounds appear higher in search results and/or so you can sort results 'by user feedback'.

This is not a matter of competition between users, but would only serve to bring better search results and searching criteria to users.

I 'd like to hear what your opinions are about the above.

Thnx

GREAT...how do you define...low quality...is that low bit...low sampling...poor recording practice...would you reject a good quality recording that is 4-8 or 12 bit over a 16 bit recording of lesser quality? editting can be verry hard for some users,with lesser quality kit...i think this is a great idea allthough it mite chase some users away for lack of abbility...i can edit and/or enhance (master)what i download from the site to soot my needs...should all clips be held to a verry verry high standerd or a verry usable standerd..some gide lines at registration mite be the ticket....16-44.100 or something like that so as not to make the filtering too extreem for some...don't get me wrong high quality is best..but some times a little grit is what someone is looking for...

TASOS...sounds great...i like that soundsnap is moving forword...i havn't found nything quite like it anywhere on the web...when you say e-mail feed back to help improve..are you saying someone is going to tell/teach the uploader how to record/edit the sound thay tried to deliver in a better fashion...or simply tell them to head back to the drawing board & try again...(if rejected)...will the "feed back" option only be avalible when a user downloads a file...& will it register the user that is giving the rating...i think your ideas are a good start... weed out some of the (just stopped in to see if you like my stuff users)with no real idea of what should be uploaded & what should not...& is this going to change the (legal usage) aspects of soundsnap...

Yeah, let's keep Soundsnap special and tidy. No "youtube"-type "anything goes"-mentality please. I try to take some time every couple of days to surf around soundsnap and rate some sounds I listen to but that doesn't do it - there are indeed quite a few trashy, low quality and redundant files here. The "sort by highest rating"-criteria at the moment means nothing if someone would look for "very good"-sounds.
The only thing I would consider is that poor tagging/categorizing must not be a criteria for evaluating sounds. Some newcomers might upload decent sounds but don't know anything about tagging so the Admins/more experienced users could take care of that. What is problematic imo is that the instance upload/download feature of Soundsnap would vanish if every sound would have to be inspected before being available for other users. Hmmmm....

Anyway - I advertize for Soundsnap every day amongst film and music peole and everybody is astonished and amazed by this website!

how a bought a "bin" that holds the newly uploaded files(waiting for the o.k.)that other users can search/select rite away... (unaproved files wating for aproval... or something) and are held for a "small" amount of time before the final o.k. is given... or not..after wich thay are moved to the main categorys of sounds... for all to see & use...win/win for every one... :-) users can grab a file before it "mite" be rejected if it soots their needs... over all high quality control is still maintaned...

p.s. date indexing at time of upload would be a nice feature (for all to see)

Hi gmany03,

Welcome and thanks for sharing! First of all, don't worry for your own work- your loops are sounding fine and won't get deleted! :-)

But to answer your questions:

We need the mp3 format for playback- thats how our system works. Most people will download he aif or wav, so dont worry about that. People know that the mp3 preview on the player has lower quality and they are more forgiving.

About lo-fi loops, we will mostly allow them, when it comes to musical sounds.
We want to allow any kind of artistic expression that is done intentionally (I can usually tell, or we can know that form the description). But I won't put up with people that don't take the time to edit or mix properly and pollute the library with junk. Hope that make sense.

For recorded sound effects, we are are also very strict, since we don't want to mix our professional quality sounds with inferior recordings, as it is done on most sharing sites.