[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio

[R41NB0W4C3 (R41NB0W)]

@BitFist

Can I change my audio assets back to public if they are made private on March 22?

• No, the ability to set audio to public will be temporarily paused while other solutions are being looked into. We do not have an estimate for when we will re-enable the ability for you to change an asset from private to public.

Yay more waiting after already having only 10 audios a month

[Sir_Highness]

@drjellyiam

what if i wanted to upload an audio that i made myself for everybody to use? Would it have to be under 6 seconds?

No, all new audio will be private, no matter the length. They stated that the ability to make an upload public will be “temporarily paused”.

So, I’m assuming at some point you will be able to share it, they haven’t released the timeline on that.

[Messeras]

adding to this, the fact that a twitter bot has better detection than roblox has in terms of audio detection is just

[Sir_Highness]

I wasn’t trying to be condescending, simply explaining why just because someone payed to upload an audio that they didn’t create doesn’t make them the owner and give them a right to share the audio to the public. These users created the problem that Roblox is having to try to fix.

Agree, would be nice if Roblox had better tech to just scan and private the songs detected by an audio ‘fingerprint’

[minecraftwolf1978 (Lolz)]

Yea, that’s embarrassing. especially since Roblox is a multi-billion dollar compony.

[Guest_player1689 (Average_1717)]

Uh is this temporary to just remove the bad copyrighted music from the platform i hope this is temporarily or they are joking this update will ruin Roblox and so many games that use the sound library. I mean this can’t be forever right?

[Steponsky]

Horrible, simply idiotic and horrible. This site has been a former shell of itself for quite some time now and the continuous faulty updates coupled with the lack of sufficient payment for content creators & the rampant cases of predators on ROBLOX is digging this site a bigger grave. I’ve been on this site PROUDLY since 2010 but these ridiculous updates with the lack of care for the community further proves this site’s main goal which is profit, not creativity or imagination which it once was. Deeply disappointed with this SINCE there has been a huge influx of younger players on this site for quite some time now and the care shown towards the community is a backhand of disrespect. This lack of privacy and refusal to acknowledge their part in this huge issue just further proves this site’s ‘TRUE’ goal.

[Lumanyii (Luma)]

Roblox Staff,

This is probably the worst idea I have seen come out of the Roblox Platform, and I absolutely do not get the thought process for why this had been decided as so.

But what I’m going to go over is has been probably been said a thousand times already, or hasn’t been though of, either way I want to amplify why this update is a really bad idea and there’s better ways to implement this, than what has been decided by the platform.

PROS,

Starting off simple,

@BitFist

We are making important changes to the way privacy works for audio, giving you more control over how your assets are used across the platform.

I think this is a great idea, but I do think it could have been implemented in other places just before adding it to the audio selection in all honesty. But, still, this helps improve the experience for audio creation especially if they wanted to distribute it in different ways.

@BitFist

Starting today, all audio uploads are free. To support this change, there are now monthly limits on how many audio assets you can upload.

I believe this to be a great change honestly, the creation of audios and testing them in-game is a whole process that can be expensive, but I think bringing the price down, or allowing for better options for testing in-game audios would have been a much better idea. This still improves the audio creation scene by a lot so people wouldn’t have to hope their audio doesn’t have any problems, or people with a bank vault would have to share their lifesavings with Roblox to see if an audio works.

@BitFist

All of the Roblox official licensed catalog of Music and SFX will remain Public and usable by developers in any of their experiences.

Makes more than enough sense, the audio catalog is a good choice if you need non-specific music. There really isn’t much for me to say here as I usually dislike what’s been offered by the platform.

CONS,

Here is the fundamental issues with this update that NEED to be addressed,

@BitFist

On March 22,

Why do we have such a small timeframe to complete these necessary actions? Not everyone has all the time in the world on Roblox, games take time to develop and sounds are NO exception! Sounds can be hard to create, especially for people just getting into sound design, and replacements could take a long time to find if people are looking for specific sounds! The Roblox music catalog doesn’t provide SFX, and if it does the catalog would already be flooded with similarly named items making it very hard to find good, or specific sounds. Especially looking for user created sounds was hard enough, which brings me onto my next point,

@BitFist

On March 22, all new audio uploaded will be Private and all existing audio longer than 6 seconds will be set to Private .

I don’t get how this made it through, this fundamentally breaks all older Roblox game’s audio, of course the developers can fix it right? I mean, if they were still on the platform they could fix it, unless they decided to abandon it. So, problematically, older Roblox games are going to go without sound, which doesn’t make any sense.

Not forgetting this still absolutely affects the toolbox, what about toolbox models? The ones that play sound? Nope, those won’t even work now unless the creator sets it to public, but these are probably in the hundreds of thousands to probably even under a hundred-thousands of models that would have to be updated to comply. Which also brings me into another con,

@BitFist

Can I change my audio assets back to public if they are made private on March 22?

• No, the ability to set audio to public will be temporarily paused while other solutions are being looked into. We do not have an estimate for when we will re-enable the ability for you to change an asset from private to public.

Why isn’t this available to begin with? So we’re just going to have to live with the damage until Roblox decides when we should be able to put stuff back online? So all those free models by verified creators that were verified by Roblox that people use a good amount can’t be fixed until ???. I’m going to say what people have already said, Roblox needs to give us proper timeframes. I just don’t get how this even works.

@BitFist

all existing audio longer than 6 seconds will be set to Private⁠

This doesn’t make any sense, you want to give us more privacy with this whole update, but at the same time just going back to normal with the length of clips being under six seconds being public? I mean, you acknowledged SFX exists, but underplay its value. SFX is usually under six seconds, a lot, not if all Roblox SFX such as the Linked Sword are under six seconds.

@BitFist

Thresholds will differ between accounts. For example, an account that is ID verified will be able to upload 100 audio assets per month. Learn more about uploading sounds and music here

I don’t understand why ID verified accounts only get ten exclusive audio uploads per month? The platform is under CAPPA and the platform is meant for kids and teens, problem being I was one of those twelve year old’s who experimented with Roblox development tools in 2016, so the problem is the fact because audios can’t go public until an undecided amount of time, and the fact the audio catalog by Roblox, from what I have seen, doesn’t include SFX I needed or I haven’t seen at all, and usually doesn’t carry what we want usually, means that people who don’t have ID’s cannot work on their sound design due to an arbitrary limit of ten? It’s obvious ten isn’t enough, one hundred would be perfectly fine, or even fifty, but ten?

@BitFist

When do I have to review and update the audio references in my experience?

• You must review and make any changes before March 22, 2022. Begin reviewing all audio in your experience using the Audio Discovery plugin as soon as possible.

Sound designers are going to love this one, the fact Roblox doesn’t have any kind of controls that allow for mass selection makes doing this for some difficult due to the amount of sounds they’ve probably uploaded, including fishing from audio samples they didn’t like/didn’t use, not forgetting if they’re allowing players to use these audio samples and making it for them is going to make this really hard to do and time consuming.

@BitFist

How do I ensure items like radios and boomboxes continue to function?

• If your experience allows users to play arbitrary audio, it may be disrupted later this month when many audio assets become private.

To avoid disruption, we recommend you switch from offering Id-based playback to letting users pick from the Roblox licensed music catalog. By doing this, your users will have access to more than 100,000 rights-cleared songs and more than 100,000 professionally-produced SFX from top audio and music partners like APM, Monstercat, Pro Sound Effects, Nettwerk Music Group and Position Music.

You can browse the Roblox licensed catalog and the Monstercat collection now, with more to come.

This has made boomboxes fundamentally useless, people will at the moment only be able to access music that isn’t really popular at all, people have wide range of tastes and the fact they’ve turned a whole culture in Roblox, well, actually, they’ve essentially just destroyed it. People won’t buy boomboxes anymore, well, some may, but sales for these are going to go dip severely, and developers are going to be affected as boomboxes are popular within our community. People don’t want to hear royalty-free music, they want to listen to music from people who give permission for it to be used on the platform, or well, copyrighted does still make it onto here and obviously that’s not what Roblox wants. Still, this isn’t about creators taking control, but taking away variety and personalization from the player communities.

@BitFist

What does this mean for other asset types like Models, Meshes, or Animations?

• Initially, privacy will only work for audio but we will eventually unlock it for all other asset types. You will then be able to choose whether to make any asset public or private.

For private assets, you will be able to manage who uses them by granting permissions to individual accounts or experiences. This will give you significantly greater control over who can use your assets and means you will eventually have more options with how you upload and share your assets.

I do see this system working much better with these three categories, but I don’t see why this couldn’t be tested with these? It doesn’t make sense to start out with audio, it’s much more complex, animation would follow underneath that as it already has its own system in place, as well as meshes as those can be controlled by deleting the mesh if too many people have control over it.

After thoughts and summary,

I don’t know why this decision was decided in the first place, many people including myself don’t like what Roblox offers, and, well, Roblox doesn’t offer a lot of specific things we need, I don’t have the technical skill to create good sounds or good music, that skills takes years to develop and it has its own costs to it. Other kinds of specific needs is realistic ambient sounds, like I’ve said though, I don’t have the skill to make these kind of sounds, especially realistic sounds, nor the fact I don’t own any audio equipment to make any, which then I would have to go and edit myself into a loop for my game.

This update breaks free models, older games, newer games, anything that includes audio in some sort of way, and not everything is going to be fixed. Time to fix these are going to take way longer than what Roblox provides and it kills off a genre of gamepass/gameplay that players love to use and enjoy with their own personalization of music and taste. The update offers too little pro to outweigh the cons for a long amount of time leaving me to prefer the older system; it’s a hypocritical system that helps very little.

I will continue to revise this and add new information, of course I could accidently include information that is wrong, has changed, or not seeing correctly. Criticism is welcomed, I just want to inform players who only see this as a ‘Free Audio’ update than just that, something that can cause major damage to the platform.

Thank you if you’ve read the whole essay.

[Maxwell_Edison]

I was literally just about to make a Boombox for users to play songs on. This is yikes, my plans seem canceled now!

Saying people aren’t allowed to make audio public again while you look for a solution is NOT enough! It is roblox’s responsibility to come up with that solution BEFORE destroying countless games and audio.

Ya’ll have abandoned that responsibility.

[aze_rty]

Quite frankly, this is going to kill our game. There is just no solution to this now.
Our game RELIES on UGC, This is going to ruin our game.

We are not alone, but even with this change there is just no way to use creative commons audios uploaded by other users for use in our game, with no whitelist system or anything like that we can’t really operate on roblox anymore.

[poprobertb6]

If you’re using audio you own or have the rights to, you can reupload it because it’s free. If you don’t own the rights to the audio, then you were using it illegally anyway. So, I think that it’s a good thing that people are now encouraged to legally use audio for their games.

[RockyRosso]

@uvtop

however I really don’t think it will happen.

If the update gets enough backlash, they may revert the update and continue working on it. They did the same with the new textures update which was postponed due to the amount of backlash.

[estonice2]

this will genuinely kill off the platform

[Sir_Highness]

@poprobertb6

then you were using it illegally anyway

This is not necessarily true. Completely legit audio created and shared by the author of the audio for public use will also be stricken private with this change. (even though the creator/author wished it to be public)

[PebbleNet (PebbleNetwork)]

genuinely pathetic lack of foresight on roblox’s part here.

i understand the issues with asset stealing and copyright infringement on roblox, but this is completely unwaranted.

@BitFist

On March 22, all new audio uploaded will be Private and all existing audio longer than 6 seconds will be set to Private .

all existing audio longer than 6 seconds will be set to private
this change alone modifies almost every single roblox game in a negative way, especially games with particularly inactive developers, or even ones who have quit development alltogether.
90% of the problems with this new system would be solved here by just not having pre-existing assets automatically set to private, instead of forcibly removing sounds from people’s games.

its geniunely upsetting to see enormous, platform-changing updates like this pushed
without community feedback and less than 2 weeks notice.

i hope the strong opinion of many of the developers from this community helps roblox revaluate this change.

-pebblenet

[Lorourkethebest]

In this case, I am using a rain sound from a rain plugin than reuploading it so that the rain will match the sound. Also, the sound was already public anyways.

Rain Effect - Roblox

[Bubblebuddy200 (Dwayne)]

Mark your calendars for March 22 cause that is when this platform dies or will get a VERY significant hit unless this issue is properly dealt with until then

It was fun while it lasted Roblox

[Guest_player1689 (Average_1717)]

I hope that’s the case Roblox really needs to listen to the community. If Roblox goes forward with this update there will be a lot of developers leaving the platform. and surely Roblox cares about losing money.

[DanTDM_Rocks999 (Dan)]

All Roblox needs to do is not private any old audio and keep them public. Otherwise, I’d say that free audio and a privacy lock on assets are one of the best features to come.

[Dango360]

This is a digital archive disaster in the making.

We’ve seen what YouTube has done with dislikes (and unlisted videos before 2017), we’ve seen what Yahoo has done to GeoCities (and the link rot that came from the consequences of it). The same fate will now happen to us; a community of which relied on other people’s creations to make our own.

Losing an entire chunk of data will break many things. What else will Roblox do that will break more games? Can we even trust them anymore? Do we now treat them like corporations that have no care for compatibility? Of which will choose to delete everything in a heartbeat if all else fails, rather than to allow us to recover/keep the data we made?

I hope that they listen to us. To revert or to change the way they do it.
A critical change, with a critical problem.