[libreplanet-discuss] Liberating Freesound.org

[Fabio Pesari]

As someone who wanted to make videogames back in the days, I came across
Freesound.org, which is a helpful resource for finding audio samples but
had (and still has) the following problems:

1. Users can't download any sounds without logging in

2. It isn't really free as in freedom, since many files are under
   nonfree Creative Commons NonCommercial and Sampling+ licenses.

   This is bad for us because it will lead to fewer free programs,
   since games that use those samples will be excluded from
   LibreGameWiki, the Free Software Directory and free distros
   (including Debian).

3. They do not allow copyleft licenses like the CC BY-SA and the GPL
   or if they do, their search engine doesn't mention it

4. Many files are released as mp3s

5. They track users via Google Analytics, and some of the JavaScript
   code they distribute is proprietary (like Google Maps and ReCaptcha,
   which also track users).

   Enabling JavaScript is necessary to filter samples by license, so it
   isn't possible to search for freely licensed samples without also
   running the proprietary, user-tracking Google Analytics code.

6. Their API requires a key and only allows noncommercial usage

Right now they have 125207 samples released under the CC BY and 122432
samples released under the CC0 (public domain). Just for the record,
there are 37790 samples released under a NC license and 12612 samples
released under the Sampling+ license.

That's 247639 libre samples versus 50402 nonfree samples. I say the
community is definitely on the side of free culture, and I strongly
disagree with Freesound's policies, especially putting them behind a
login wall - distribution should be encouraged, not hampered.

I think that it's our duty to download all the free samples, convert
them to free formats and mirror them ourselves, either via torrent, by
uploading them to sites that already have the infrastructure (like
OpenGameArt and Archive.org) or by creating a new site which forbids
nonfree samples, removes nonfree dependencies and allows copyleft licenses.

Fortunately, the Freesound.org server and client code is released under
the AGPLv3:

https://github.com/MTG/freesound

But it must be stripped out of some functionalities (their audio
analysis and similarity search functionalities on the server, the Google
dependencies on the client).

Any audacious people interested in this project?

I put three of the main Freesound developers in CC, whom I thank if
they've been reading so far. Is there a way to download the whole
Freesound archive, complete with licensing information?