The Freesound Blog

With the help of pixelshell and oneDotOnly, we finalized the freesound 2 / nightingale logo yesterday:

For other versions of the logo, check these urls:

• adobe illustrator:  http://media.freesound.org/files/logo/freesound_logo.ai
• pdf: http://media.freesound.org/files/logo/freesound_logo.pdf
• adobe photoshop: http://media.freesound.org/files/logo/freesound_logo.psd
• small png (needs tweaking): http://media.freesound.org/files/logo/freesound_logo_small.png
• large png (needs tweaking): http://media.freesound.org/files/logo/freesound_logo_large.png

The PNG version were made by me and still need tweaking to get the best result. The designers will make new PNG versions especially for web-use.

Hello all,

you can now follow freesound 2 development on twitter, just follow the user freesounddev: http://twitter.com/freesounddev/

If you’re not a developer you might not understand everything, as there are so called “commit messages”, but you might see things flying past you recognize

- Bram

Have a look at the final and all new nightingale sound player:

http://media.freesound.org/files/newplayer/

This is the player that will be displayed in the “single sample view” page. You will need flash 10 to see it: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

Please let me know your opinions, and if you find any bugs… I’d like to hear about those as well.

For those of you interested in seeing the source code (GPL license!), you can do that right here:
http://github.com/bram/freesound/tree/bae1763d1abe9b4d09ed994ba413d68c4fac5412/sandbox/flash10player

A lot of people have been asking about updates on Nightingale development. While none of this is ready for “action” yet, I thought I would give you an overview of some of the things we have been working on. These are screenshot and designer views from what we’re cooking in the labs. Feel free to comment! All the images are low resolution, click on them for full resolution/scale versions!

The front page, dynamic version. Contains live updated news items from the blog, etc. TODO on this page: the sound player is just an image, the star rating isn’t real yet. Latest uploads (not seen here) is working but might need tweaking). On the top you can see what a logged in user sees…

The html draft of the simgle sample page. This page is a static HTML page, i.e. straight from pixelshell. The user avatars are missing, the colors need tweaking, the download button needs to be yellow, … but the general layout is there. This one also features the new and awesome “huge” sample player we’ve developed and will be shown to the community soon.

The forum front page. The little text bubbles light up if there are new posts since you last visited. This is a dynamic version, no a static html page. As you can see we’ve gone for a very minimal feel.

Forum threads. Sticky threads are red and stay on top. The minimal pagination you see at the top will be used everywhere in freesound. Again a live page, fully functional.

Forum posts. TODO on this page: only the user avatars… Smileys are very simple and minimal (you can see one at the bottom), the whole style is very “light”. You can quote a post by clicking the quotation marks right next to it.

Message inbox. Functional page, but no design yet! The message “outbox” from phpbb has been removed (as it created much confusion!). We now have inbox, sent messages and archive. Messages can be either archived or deleted.

Quite happy with the switch from subversion to git, and quite happy with github. One of the big advantages of all the new “do one thing good” websites is that they, well, do one thing very good. So, looking for bug tracking, I found Lighthouse, another wonderful website that has “Ruby on Rails” written all over it. The fanboy overload of RoR is horriblme, but some people are truely doing some really amazing things with it.

Without further ado, here is the freesound 2 ticketing  service: http://freesound.lighthouseapp.com/

Please only use it for future freesound 2 tickets, not freesound 1 tickets.

Following the overall exodus where people change from using subversion to git, we -much like lemmings- could not stay far behind.

All source code for freesound “2.0″ a.k.a. nightingale can now be found over at github:

http://github.com/bram/freesound/tree/master/

Update your links!

Hello everyone,

Thanks for all the feedback that you all gave when we posted the various freesound designs. We’ve used this feedback and worked on a new design, which is -in our opinion- offers a much better design which works well with freesound. Have a look:

Comments? Post them in the forum…

Go over to http://www.freesound.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3542 and help us decide which logo to choose, and comment on a possible new design!

• Would you like to help build Freesound 2.0 a.k.a. nightingale?
• Do you have plenty of experience with making design for web and pouring that design into clean, validating xhtml and css?
• Do you like the idea of having a link to your company or website on every page of freesound, visited by over 20000 unique people per day?
• Do you have a visible online portfolio?
• Are you able to do this for free (or almost for free)?

If you answered yes to these questions, contact me at bdejong@domain [where domain is iua.upf.edu] with subject: “I want to help with the freesound design!”

After looking around for a search engine for Nightingale, and comparing features between all the various ones (from using tsearch2 on postgres to Sphinx to Solr to …) I’ve settled on Solr. Configuring and running Solr was (much) easier than expected at the start. After about a day of hacking around, I got a nice tag-browser running, with Alax-ified searching through the tags. A bit more hacking around and I decided I would write a mash-up of all existing Python Solr wrappers. SolPython and solr.py, the one that’s included with Solr, seemed very unpythonic and little developed. PySolr on the other hand looked very nice, but there were some things in it I thought vould be better. Particularly, i wondered why the authors (two known Python/Django devs) used the XML parsing and didn’t use the JSON output. When you search in Solr, you can tell it to reply you in a number of output formats. They chose the XML output, I rewrote to use the JSON output, and allowed for more output parsers to be written / plugged in.

Neither Solr.py or PySol has classes for wrapping the search parameters. After reading through the docs I added a lightweight wrapper for a lot of the parameters.

We keep track of searches in freesound, so we can “replay” those searches for testing purposes, and after a bit of testing I found out some interesting things. Using Solr and a relatively heavy set of output features (I want to see a lot of “faceting”), I tested a batch of 100K searches. It looks like I can run 50 queries per second on my macbook pro. As the set of documents in Freesound is relatively small (”only” 50K sounds), everything fits very nicely in a very small cache (only 128MB), inluding all faceting data.

As before this source code is also open source, but -as Xavier gave me the go-ahead- this one is BSD instead og GPL. I will continue to release “support code” under the BSD license.

The code can be found here: http://iua-share.upf.edu/svn/nightingale/trunk/sandbox/solr/solr.py
The example code I used for benchmarking here: http://iua-share.upf.edu/svn/nightingale/trunk/sandbox/solr/freesound_test.py

Python/Solr people, feel free to send me any feedback!