Today is the 8th anniversary of Freesound! Congratulations to the researchers, developers, moderators, donors and users who have been and are part of this project for the success achieved so far. Thanks to the collaboration of this great community we have now more than 160.000 free sounds from all over the world.

Freesound was started in 2005 in our research group. One of the first aims behind it was to create an open repository of sounds to be used for scientific and artistic research, but quickly became a very popular site used by a wide variety of people to share sounds and the experiences around them. Users upload sounds recorded or created by themselves and share them under Creative Commons licenses. The sounds in Freesound have good quality, are free and legal, so professionals from different fields (cinema, music, videogames, software...) as well as amateur users, use them in their works.

Freesound has now 3.5 million registered users around the world, about 40.000 unique visits a day, and the total number of unique visits in those eight years has been more than 57 million, coming from almost all the countries of the world.

There are many successful usages of the sounds in Freesound, for example in the movie Children of Men and in a song of the internationally known band The Prodigy. Freesound has received several awards, such as a BMW award, a Barcelona City award and a Google research award twice. But what is most important, during all those years users have shared really amazing sounds. Find the opinion of the community about the coolest sounds on Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/forum/freesound-project/33568/

The interest for sharing sounds keeps growing and the community of active users of Freesound is also growing. For the MTG, Freesound offers an exceptional framework with which to carry research in the context of semantic web technologies. But we are specially proud of being able to offer a very useful service to the society.

Freesound.org