Hi everyone,

In our recent 2020 in numbers blog post we predicted that we would reach 500k sound uploads at some point in 2021 and… it has just happened! At some point during the past weekend, the number of sounds which are available for download in Freesound has surpassed half a million. Note that by sounds which are available for download we mean sounds that have been already moderated and approved, and here I am not counting sounds that were deleted in the past. Huge congratulations to the whole Freesound community! This is a remarkable achievement, and we could have not imagined at the beginning of Freesound that one day it would host more than 500k Creative Commons sounds uploaded by thousands of people around the world (and downloaded by millions!).

To celebrate this achievement, we are also very happy to say that, as part of the changes in the Freesound infrastructure we’re making these weeks, we’ve managed to significantly increase Freesound speed, including downloading speed. In fact, our monitoring tools indicate that Freesound is now very fast, and our subjective experience using the website also says so. We have just barely started all the infrastructure changes that we’ll carry out in the next months, so many things still need to be changed and improved and you can expect some issues here and there. But the most processing intensive part of Freesound has already been moved to a new environment of the University IT infrastructure that we can scale much easily and will allow us to adapt much better to the future needs of Freesound. Hurray!

We could not be happier to bring you these news
We hope you enjoy browsing more than 500k Creative Commons sounds with the new super-fast Freesound!

frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team