Anecdotal stories of me trying to use the audio library search and figuring how bad it is aside - nevermind the numerous other problems “audio” is suffering from - I suggest the optional categorizing into “sound effects” and “music” for uploaded audio items.
Clearly, it wouldn’t be hard to implement - go with sound effects and music (perhaps some meaningfully chosen sub-categories as well?) instead of the current “genres” (which are just taken from game genres for the sake of category consistency and serve little purpose anyhow (building audio? really?)).
Currently, trying to find sound effects is a demanding task, as the audio library is flooded with popular music the names of which tend to coincide with what you might be searching for. Here is an example of me trying to search a running sound effect. The items marked with blue colour in the picture are sound effects, the rest (orange) are music tracks.
I do not know how effective at solving the problem implementing this would be, as it depends on whether the community adopts properly cataloguing their uploads or not. What I do know is that this change would be very simple to do and would certainly not make things worse, only potentially better. So, I figured why not.
Hence why I wrote “optional”, the same way genres are not currently required - personally, I would be in favour of enforcing a selection of the audio type but given the rest of the site does not do that I didn’t think it likely to happen here.
Well… It could automatically select the category depending on the length of the audio, as if the audio has a duration of 1- 15 seconds, it gets autochanged as a sound effect.
Not sure if it’s realistic to tag it backwards, and if, definitely not automatically. There are (for some reasons that are beyond me) music excerpts that are around 10 seconds in length and then there are things like ambient sounds which can utilise the full 2 minute limit.
It would probably still be considerably better than the current state of the library but I’d still be in favour of having a properly categorised, if smaller selection.
