The Freesound Project, a project of the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University, is an extremely cool database of Creative Commons licensed audio samples. The site's strengths lie in its extensive searching & browsing and object metadata. Kudos to them for explicitly stating, "Samples are useless without good descriptions and tags."
Collection Principles
Any and all samples are welcomed into Freesound's repository, as long as they're a) released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License, and b) not copyrighted. The CC license they've chosen allows users to download the samples, remix them, and use them in noncommercial distributed works with attribution (assuming it's not advertising). Each sample displays download metrics, a permalink, and allows for commenting, rating and tagging. Freesound allows browsing through a conventional keyword search, a tag cloud, by user name, geographic location (samples are geotagged), and a clever Remix! tree. Their "similarity searches" are based on the sound's semantic information. Neat.
Object Characteristics
When you download a sample, it's unique ID is appended to the file name. As best as I can tell, all samples are either in FLAC (lossless), AIFF/WAV (uncompressed lossless), or MP3/OGG (compressed). Freesound is the first digital repository that I've seen use a waveform display to depict frequency information through color - colors towards blue are low in frequency and colors toward red are high in frequency. Recording methodology is left up to the submitter; some provide it and some don't. Freesound encourages thorough documentation ("your descriptions need to be as precise as possible"), so the structural and descriptive metadata on each sample more often that not looks like this.
Metadata
I'm in love with this metadata. Seriously, it's fantastic. Sample pages list the audio format, frequency, bit rate, channels (mono or stereo), duration, file size, CC license, and user supplied tags and description. There's even a forum post dedicated to describing a sample based on four levels: macro (broad description), meso (description broken up into smaller events), micro (the sample's spectromorphology), and technical (what technology was used to create the sample).
Intended Audience
Anyone in the market for sound effects for any media application - film, music, radio, Web, etc. - should find this site useful. Creative Commons advocates will probably be drawn in because Freesound trumps CC's horn to no end.
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