Creative Commons Sounds

SoundSet Creator
#1

Hi Folks,

I know there are a lot of sources out there for music and sound effects, and I’m sure we’re all collecting vast amounts of stuff. I wonder if there might be a way to pool our resources.

Personally, I’ve been gathering lots of Creative Commons music - most of it registered as CC BY NC (free for Non-Commercial Use, so long as it’s attributed to the original creator), though some of it is CC BY NC ND (as above, but not allowing for derivatives, and so - as I understand it - no good for Soundset Creation).

Currently I’m working on organising this collection for putting it up on Dropbox, and once that’s sorted, I’ll be happy to share that link with you guys if any of you want it.

I wonder, though, if there’s a clever way for us to create a full database of sounds we pull from other places and share with each other (only when they are free-to-share, of course, and with their licensing information intact). I’m not versed in the legalities, and I don’t know any clever ways of doing this. It would be particularly helpful if we could tag sounds and music so that they can be searched in clever ways.

(This might actually be a bit of a Blue Sky feature request for the creator, but I think there might be away for us users to make something in the meantime.)

#2

Since I am currently making STAR WARS themed Sound Sets for my campaign I’ll stat later this year, I can’t give you access to my sounds, since I use them only privately or else we might get flak from LFL for posting them. I have made a thread of how to access certain data from Video Games though.

If I start doing other Soundsets I’ll gladly send my stuff to your dropbox.
I need a good Steam Engine Locomotive sound in the future. Maybe Benjamin will put it in Syrinscape modern, which he teased?

#3

Yeah, once we get to the process of posting them to share, we’re going to all need to be pretty careful and forthright about where we get our sounds - which is largely why I’m thinking it might be worthwhile developing a large library of sounds we know we can use.

For your Steam Engine, there are a few things over at freesound.org that might suit what you’re looking for. ( https://www.freesound.org/search/?q=steam+train&f=&s=score+desc&advanced=0&g=1 )

#4

Yeah I’ve been wondering the same thing. A lot of the sounds I use are from free sites but I also use music and sound effects from films so will have to be very careful with what I share and what I keep for personal use. Some kind of library of free sounds would be very useful, the problem would be who has ownership and takes responsibility to ensure there is nothing copyrighted stored there.

#5

Okay! I have had a further thought on this.

We don’t actually need to store our sounds - there are plenty of sites where we could upload what we make (freesound, the freemusicarchive, etc.) But what would be very helpful to us is a kind of directory where we could link to the sounds we find, with Syrin-appropriate tags to help us find what we need.

So I have a proposition: we could start a website somewhere free (I am thinking of Wordpress, because I know it, but I am open to suggestions). There, anyone with an account can put up a post using a specific format, which would include the name of the sound, a link to it, the name of the creator, and information about the license. We would only permit links to Creative Commons work - depending on how things go, we could add the step that every post has to be approved by a moderator. That way I don’t think there’s any real obligation on us to triple-check copyright (since we wouldn’t be storing anything), but we can still help people find content that is available for them to use.

People could comment with suggestions for tags, which moderators or original posters could add. That way we could search for relevant sounds using lots of different tags. But it would require quite a lot of effort from users in terms of adding stuff - until it gets a fair amount of content, it won’t be very useful. But if we build it, it could be a great resource.

I’d be very happy to set something like that up, if people are interested.