The Freesound Blog

We had known for a while, but were sworn to secrecy (queue spy music). Now that it’s out we can say it as well: we got an honorary mention at the very prestigious Prix Ars Electronica 2008! Our friends over at reactable (another UPF / MTG project) got the Golden Nica, the highest honor at ars electronica, for which we congratulate them and will give them a big hug next week!!!

Meanwhile we’ve started Sons de Barcelona, a local sound project concerning freesound, sounds in general and Barcelona. The focus of this project will be field-recordings in Barcelona, coupled with workshops for younger kids. If you read Catalan and/or are located in Catalunya, you should really have a look!

After 3 years of using the rather long and confusing “freesound.iua.upf.edu” URL, we have finally convinced ourselves and the university that we needed a new domain. Starting effectively now, The Freesound Project get’s a new url:

http://www.freesound.org

(We will also stop refering to Freesound as “The Freesoud Project” but will rather switch to saying “Freesound dot org”.)

A few words about this domain name. After a long debate we decided we would buy the domain from buydomains.com. Buydomains.com (deliberately not turned into a link!) is one of those companies that makes money from buying domains on the web, holding them ransom and then selling them for a very high price. Depending on your view this might be called cybersquatting (although I don’t like the name as I have respect for squatters) or just plain extorsion: freesound.org was bought for the sum of 4073€.

Once Nightingale is up, we will have one of those nice “donate until we get to this sum” meters so the community can pay up to half of that. That way we can say that the Freesound.org domain is owned by the community. If we had done it the other way around (ask the community for half, then buy the domain), someone would have outsmarted us by buying the domain and increasing the price even more.

It was about time to make our support for Freesound even more official and give it an even stronger personality. We have also started a new initiative which will be hosted under the name http://barcelona.freesound.org/ and we are hoping that we will be able to start (or perhaps others will start!) other local initiatives related to sounds and sound recording. More news about barcelona.freesound.org soon!

• 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!