Search improvements

It's hard to put this down to a single feature request, but far and away my biggest pain point using Soundsnap is with searching. Some ideas I had for improvements are:

  • Prune low quality SFX from your library. Sometimes less is more.
  • Allow user ratings on SFX.
  • Sort your search results based on popularity and/or user ratings.
  • Allow refining/exclusion of search results directly from the search results page (I'm aware of the advanced search page, but allowing refining right from the search results page would be a time-saver).

 

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Comments

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  • Official comment

    Thanks Eric and Robb.

    You both make some good points. This is valuable as we 're in the process of improving and redesigning search & results.

     

    Low Quality Sound Effects: we curate the whole catalog and I stand by the quality of 99.9% of the library as it comes from the world's best sound designers and recordists.

    There might be a bad sound here and there, but sometimes they 're there for a reason: for example it might be a vintage recording with character or its something that we think is rare and we don't want to delete it.

    Finding/ flagging those few sounds that are bad would be useful however.

    SFX User Ratings: we used to have those back in the day, but since we curate the catalog it makes less sense. Then there's the issue of who is rating. Not all users are savvy enough to understand the technical aspect of recordings (sound is not their job anyway in most cases). Another issue we encountered is that there's a lot of scripts and bots that manipulate and do various actions on websites (for whatever reason) and end up messing up what users actually did.

    Sort results by popularity: Its something thats definitely on our radar. But doing this effectively is a lot harder that it sounds technically because there's a lot of parameters and its easy to get wrong. We are using a third party search engine and I think we might be able to do this.. If you mean to simply allow users to sort results by 'most popular' thats pretty easy to do, but I think you 're referring to a more sophisticated system that takes into account download stats versus play stats etc. which is quite complex. We 're looking into this further.

    Library filtering: We already have this, but its not perfect (for example you can't select more than one library etc.). We also have duration filtering that will be greatly improved in the next iteration. 

    Excluding Music: We are 90% sound effects and only 10% music loops (we 're mostly focused on sound effects). But I agree that this may be useful.

    Multi-download: You can download as easily as you can 'tick' a sound. But a lot of people seem to be asking for this. We need to see if this is doable. Will look into it further.

     

    Stay tuned for a revamped search and results page that should be ready this summer.

    Thanks !

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  • Agreed.. Also, allow to search by suppliers/studio or to omit by any category..
    Sound design for TV post.. We don't usually need the music stuff.. Or, we know Watson Wu or Sound holder has something we might be looking for...

    And, I rarely use it because once you do have a few results you want you have to manually download everything individually.. If you had a tick box and could download as a folder all at once that makes it to integrate into a project.

    For instance.. If I'm using a vehicle.. I will need more than one file to create the moves on screen.. Etc. So i will need about 4 to 6 files to do a start.. Idle.. Away slow to medium.. Into a steady...
    That's being conservative.

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  • Echoing Rob's comments that the ability to exclude music, and download multiple would be useful in film/game sound design situations.

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  • Thanks for your detailed response, Tasos. Perhaps I should have said "usefulness" instead of "quality". For example, "Twelve year old boy says yawn BLASTWAVEFX 13647".

    This sound is technically recorded well and the actor does a good performance. I just can't imagine a situation in which it would actually be useful.

    Admittedly, the situation with "not useful" sound effects got much better for me, when I realized could just add " -traffic" to my search results (There used to be a lot of urban field recordings in your library that weren't good for much other than ambience layers, because there was so much ambience bleed. That seems to have improved, over the years).

    I want to reiterate my request for reining directly from the search results page, because I didn't see you specifically address that in your reply. Let me give a clear example use case:

    I search for "pigeon". I get a bunch of clay pigeons. So I type "pigeon -clay". Better, but now I realize I want to also filter out the ones with wings flapping, so I type "pigeon -clay -flapping". It would be faster if the search box already contained my last search string, so I wouldn't have to retype "pigeon" each time. It's a little thing, I know, but those efficiency improvements really add up, over the course of a day of sound design.

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  • Good that see a discussion of search improvements :-)

    Perhaps an easy start would be just a good explanation of what search capabilities are already available. I can't even seem to find this.

    • How to navigate to the advanced search page?
    • How to use advanced search.
    • Does soundsnap support boolean searches? If so how to use them.
    • Can you combine filters? IE a combination of tags, libraries length and boolean operators?

    Keep up the great work, Cheers, John

     

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