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?