The Freesound Project

About
The Freesound Project is a website dedicated to collecting and dispersing audio samples. The audio content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license - allowing you to do whatever you like with the files, pending any sort of distribution includes making clear to the consumer the terms of the work. Their goal is to allow users to browse available sounds in new and different ways, up and download to and from the database, and interact with artists.

History
Launched on April 5, 2005, The Freesound Project was a project of the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University with Bram de Jon responsible for its development and administration. In 2006, the dystopian film, Children of Men, legally used a sample from Freesound - "male_Thisj_loud_scream.aiff" which was posted by the user thanvaannispen. They also properly attributed and credited the sample in the films end credit sequence.

Features
The Freesound Project offers its users the ability to tag, geotag, preview tracks via flash, and allows access to sample packs, a waveform display, mootcher library and all under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Anyone can join and use the audio provided or add their own to the repository, if they so choose. They are looking for any and all audio samplings along the lines of - field recordings, kit recordings, generated sounds and more - pending they are not copyrighted. They are not however, looking for songs or compositions

My Opinion
My assumption, is that this is not the only version of this type of database available to people and will probably not be the last. This is something that I think has great potential in numerous realms - whether it be film, music, video games, or pretty much anything. Given that the distributed audio is free given credit is given where credit is due, I feel this could be quite the viable option for many people in the realms of independent and other open source creations. As someone who has worked in the world of film making - if I were to ever make a film and need a sound byte of some sort, without this sort of project at my fingertips, I'd be forced to steal a copyrighted audio sample - which could in turn possibly come back to bite me in the rear - but with this sort of project available to me, I don't have to worry about that. Rock on fellas.