Openverse, which was formerly known as Creative Commons Search before it joined the WordPress project, has passed an important milestone with its newly added support for audio files. The catalog has now indexed more than 800,000 audio files from across the internet and its development team has now taken audio support out of the beta phase.
Visitors to Openverse can now search for and explore audio files for use in their videos, podcasts, or other creative projects, all of which is available for free use under Creative Commons licenses. It is an incredible resource to have that is expanding and improving every day.
The Search results can be filtered by permitted use, license, audio category, extension, duration, and source to find exactly what you want to use on your site. Previewing audio files works well and each file has attribution information readily available to copy to properly give credit where needed. Clicking on “Get this audio” will take the visitor to the file on the external website where it can be downloaded for use.
Deeper integration with WordPress core is on the way for Openverse files. It would be interesting to see WordPress’ core Audio block integrate access to Openverse, in addition to the current methods used, the same way the Image block allows users to browse Openverse for CC images.
Gutenberg’s contributors are currently exploring how they can add basic Openverse integration to the inserter for easier use. Matias Ventura, lead architect of Gutenberg, has proposed adding a Media tab to the existing tabs for Blocks, Patterns, and Reusable blocks, which would allow dragging and dropping content into the canvas.
“The inserter panel should support the ability to drag media from the inserter into the canvas, including dragging into block placeholders to quickly update patterns and such with your own content, the Media tab would allow users to choose between categorized assets from the media library, and from Openverse.”
Matias Ventura
Gutenberg engineer Nik Tsekouras created a PR with a prototype, which is basically a proof-of-concept, to explore how this might be implemented in the future.
Development is still in the exploration and early stages, but this looks like it could be a promising new integration that would make it easy for WordPress users to tap into Openverse’s massive catalog of 600+ million free creative works.
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