  Music loops are essential ingredients in electronic music production, and
there is a high demand for pre-recorded loops in a variety of styles. Several
commercial and community databases have been created to meet this demand, but
most are not suitable for research due to their strict licensing. We present
the Freesound Loop Dataset (FSLD), a new large-scale dataset of music loops
annotated by experts. The loops originate from Freesound, a community database
of audio recordings released under Creative Commons licenses, so the audio in
our dataset may be redistributed. The annotations include instrument, tempo,
meter, key and genre tags. We describe the methodology used to assemble and
annotate the data, and report on the distribution of tags in the data and
inter-annotator agreement. We also present to the community an online loop
annotator tool that we developed. To illustrate the usefulness of FSLD, we
present short case studies on using it to estimate tempo and key, generate
music tracks, and evaluate a loop separation algorithm. We anticipate that the
community will find yet more uses for the data, in applications from automatic
loop characterisation to algorithmic composition.
