Guys,
I think the point that you are making is that quality is relevant. I agree, but only partially.
There are quality standards that can be applied to mixing of music, but especially to the recording of sound effects. Good recording, without backround noise can be even calculated scientifically.
But for bad editing, poor recording techniques, low fidelity sounds and more we need to have a human being to decide. This is not a perfect system, but it is 99% of the times correct from my experience.
The goal of Soundsnap has been to offer high quality sounds to the masses and its not easy to acheive that. I know some people will disagree with our methods, but we need to remain dedicated to our vision.
There have been two major steps that we are taking to improve the quality of Soundsnap:
1) Sound Cleanup
We have started a major cleanup of low quality, low fidelity and badly edited sounds.
This means that a lot of people will see many of their sounds being deleted.
Its an unpleasant but necessary step that we need to take in order to preserve and improve our overall quality and user satisfaction. I would like to apologize in advance and thank everyone who has contributed for their precious time they took to share their sounds.
In most cases, we will email the contributor to explain what the problem with their sounds was and how they can improve. This will happen especially to contributors that have many deleted sounds, rather than just a few.
Meanwhile, we will be improving the descriptions and tagging sounds in order to improve the search experience for users.
2) Sound administration and approval
Since a couple of days ago, we have enabled a sound administration system so that sounds are approved before being published.
Feedback will be sent in most cases to contributors, but we don't have the resources to guarantee a response for everyone.