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 Flash artists to use the music from the 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. Flash artists 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 has a voting system similar to the Flash Portal, but voting does not gain the voter Experience Points and 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 8 Mb cannot be submitted to the Audio Portal. Mp3 Files that are submitted to it have been ensured of that it's sampled at 44.1Khz
Genres
The Audio Portal is divided into genres to aid searching for particular types of music
- Easy Listening contains Classic and Jazz.
- Electronic contains Ambient, Dance, Drum N Bass, House, Industrial, New Wave, Techno, Trance and Videogame.
- Hip Hop, Rap and R&B contains Hip Hop - Modern, Hip Hop - Oldskool and R&B.
- Metal, Rock contains Brit Pop, Classic Rock, General Rock, Grunge, Heavy Metal, Indie, Pop and Punk.
- Miscellaneous contains Funk, Goth, Latin, Miscellaneous and Ska.
- Southern Flavor contains Bluegrass, Blues and Country.
- There is also a Voice Acting genre, but it is not shown in the dropdown list when you choose genres.
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.