Audio Portal

A-BOT and Darnell are the mascots of the Audio Portal.

The Newgrounds Audio Portal is one of the three submission sections of the site, along with the Flash Portal and the Art Portal, and is where artists can upload their music to be listened to, downloaded free or freely used in flashes. The more popular artists, such as ParagonX9 and Soundshifter, have numerous songs that are downloaded on a regular basis.

The Audio Portal is described on the Audio Forum Guidelines page: "Newgrounds first opened the Audio Portal in 2003 and since then new artists sign up every day to submit loops – totalling several hundred submissions each week"

History of the Audio Portal

The Audio Portal was the second Portal opened on Newgrounds, in 2003.

Using Newgrounds Audio Tracks on Newgrounds Flash

The site encourages game and movie artists to use the music from the Audio Portal and makes it very easy to credit the audio tracks in their flash, crediting the Audio artist in the Credits box on the left of a submission. Artists who use music from the Audio Portal are encouraged to give the Audio artists a share of the revenue generated through the revenue system.

Voting in the Audio Portal

The Audio Portal shares a common voting system with the Games and Movies Portal and the Art Portal. Voting on a minimum of five entries per day can ear the user 10 exp. The music does not go through Judgment, so uploaded tracks cannot be "blammed" by users. A user's voting power in the Audio Portal depends solely on the user's experience points: B/P-points will have no effect.

Music Submission

Only registered users can submit through any of the Portals. Files that are larger than 250 MB cannot be submitted to the Audio Portal. MP3 Files that are submitted to it must be sampled at 44.1Khz

Genres

The Audio Portal is divided into genres to aid searching for particular types of music

• Easy Listening contains Classical, Jazz and Solo Instrument.
• Electronic contains Ambient, Chipstep, Dance, Drum N Bass, Dubstep, House, Industrial, New Wave, Synthwave, Techno, Trance and Videogame.
• Hip Hop, Rap and R&B contains Hip Hop - Modern, Hip Hop - Oldskool, Nerdcore and R&B.
• Metal, Rock contains Brit Pop, Classic Rock, General Rock, Grunge, Heavy Metal, Indie, Pop and Punk.
• Other contains Cinematic, Experimental, Funk, Fusion, Goth, Miscellaneous, Ska and World.
• Podcasts contains Discussion, Music, and Storytelling.
• Southern Flavor contains Bluegrass, Blues and Country.
• Voice Acting contains A Capella, Comedy, Creepypasta, Drama, Informational, Spoken Word, and Voice Demo.

Programs

The musicians at the Audio Portal use different kinds of music programs to make their music, the one that's most used is Fruity Loops. A lot of users use the program Reason too, and Acid is used sometimes. You can see what many Audio Portal artists use in a news post made by Rig.

Future Plans for the Audio Portal

In 2010, The Interviewer asked Tom Fulp questions about the Audio Portal in Interview 2:

"Q: When it comes to the Audio Portal, I as well as a few other people believe it hasn't gotten enough attention. When it comes to redesigns or facelifts what can we expect the Audio Portal to turn into?

A: There is a massive laundry list of Audio Portal ideas and I won't even touch on some of the higher level ones until we address the more immediate issues. Current priorities include a much better moderator system so stolen music is dealt with quickly and easily, a better review process where the community is more involved with bringing new artists through (a more private version of the Art Portal scouting), audio tagging, expanded sorting and search and hopefully we'll get to "play all" and playlist features this time around.

External links

• The Audio Portal
• Fan-made Newgrounds Audio Portal advert
• 2011 Interview of Key Members