Freesound has consolidated as a leading sound sharing site since its creation in 2005 by the Music Technology Group. The original goal of Freesound was to collect royalty-free sounds that could be used for research and be easily shared under Creative Commons (CC) licenses with the research community. However, it quickly became a very well-known resource for all kinds of people and companies using audio (and now is probably the biggest repository of CC-licensed sounds.

Key indicators by January 2nd 2017:

• People: > 6.2 millions registered users, 16.5 thousand user upload sounds
• Sounds: 327.000 sounds (average of 100 new sounds per day), 18.900 sound packs, 94.2 million downloads
• Web statistics for 2016: 54.7K sessions per day (and growing!), 430.1K page views per day (> 150 million / year), 6m41s average session duration (source: Google Analytics, see tables below). According to Alexa, Freesound ranks 6,657 worldwide, 4,238 in the USA. Other similar sites such as pond5.com rank 7,618, soundbible ranks 11,500 worldwide, soundsnap 20,500 worldwide, audioblocks 12,500 worldwide and freesfx.co.uk ranks 53,241.
• Origin of visitors - main countries: 25,7% USA, 6,3% UK, 3,7% China, India and Italy (source: Alexa)

Additional features

With the Freesound API you can browse, search, and retrieve information about Freesound.org users, packs, and the sounds themselves of course. You can find similar sounds to a given target (based on content analysis) and retrieve automatically extracted features from audio files, as well as perform advanced queries combining content analysis features and other metadata (tags, etc...). With the Freesound API, you can also upload, comment, rate and bookmark sounds.

Recently, we started Freesound Labs. Freesound Labs is now a useful tool to keep track of all sorts of activities and projects that happen around Freesoundalthough the long-term goal is more ambitious: Freesound Labs could become a portal where creators, developers, researchers and Freesound users could share their projects and make them visible, effectively increasing the potential impact of Freesound and giving more value to the reuse of its content. Such portal would be also a source of inspiration for further works reusing content from Freesound, and would serve also as an indicator of potential new requirements for services that Freesound could research and provide. (see the blog post on Freesound Labs).

The Freesound promotional video (2013) shows some of the available capabilities, as well as examples of individuals and users part of the Freesound community.

Examples of use of Freesound

• Children of men 2006 movie (scream sound in the video below, from this freesound sound)     
• Song "Omen", The Prodigy (original sound here)   
• Song "Printer Jam", Mistabishi (original sound here) 
• Gangman style "sound fx only" version (all freesound sounds)  
• "Your work, made with Freesound". Forum where Freesound users show work they have done using Freesound (1350 theards as of today)
• Freesound Labs compiles research, apps, hacks and othetr tools based on Freesound