[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio

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#3545

This change is clearly tragic for most people given the feedback – I am not trying to ignore that.

However, I want to focus in on some tooling that would alleviate much of this:

1. Provide Group/Account Mapping for Sounds

I have uploaded sounds in different groups, all of which I own or have admin control over. We need options to map these sound assets transitively. This would solve the multi-group / multi-account ownership problem.

2. License Upload / Ownership Verification Tools

I actually own 2/3 of my audio that has been flagged. I purchased this audio using a monthly subscription from one vendor and individual licenses from another. But there is no real way to upload a license except to try to add it to the description fields (which will be 60% redacted). If we could prove ownership, then this would be very helpful. I’ve spent over $500 USD in licensing audio assets in the last 2 years, but very few of my assets are properly being recognized as licensed.

3. Simple ML-Based Audio Similarity and Replacement Tool

If you had a simple tool to scan audio content and find options which are very similar from various Roblox free catalogs and/or community licensed sources, then this would help. The same tool could be used to find commercial licensing options from audio licensing partners too (often an exact match). This could allow for a broad refresh of audio to free versions, but with a loss of fidelity.

If the original audio context is also maintained, then this audio mapping can be improved and the results shared across creators to improve quality over time. Note that you could pay humans to check qualify for this as workers and to generate initial labeled data - lots of people might work for Robux to assist with the effort.

Next Steps

  1. Selfishly, I am pretty desperate for #1 and #2 asap!
  2. I’m happy to help with #3 too – DM me if you want details.
6 Likes
#3546

Games live and die, if you’ve taken the time to see the new Roblox community grow, you can notice new games coming up to the charts. Not only are you providing a biased lie but, many other Roblox users have up to 2000 uploads. Don’t speak “facts” about uploads until you can provide proof and evidence, not what the biggest media outlet is telling you. Infact,

This, this right here is ridiculous. Would never happen, big games like adopt me won’t shut down because of a single update giving users up to a 2 weeks notice for some 5-10 second audio.

Lastly, this is one of the best ways to handle this, Roblox dosen’t have to do anything for us. They owe us nothing, we owe them everything. Without Roblox, there is no us. Not only are they providing us with 1000’s of audios for free and legal to use, but it’s such a kind thing to do. If you dislike this update, you must be blind-sighted by the media or something, this update has the potential that I, and smaller developers need.

#3547

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If it the qualification is shorter than six seconds, then why do these existing audios need replacement? It seems that the threshold is set to five seconds, not six

1 Like
#3548

After sleeping on it, I’ve decided that I’m done with Roblox.

We’ve been constantly bending over backwards because Roblox continues to make updates that nobody asks for, while ignoring the actual issues on their platform that would prevent this sort of stuff happening in the first place (Looking at you, moderation bots).

Every day it gets harder and harder to develop anything on this platform, and Roblox don’t show any signs of stopping that trend.

This update in particular is going to break thousands of games, and they just… don’t care. Because instead of making a proper solution to the problem at hand, they’d much rather slap a cheap band-aid on it that’s going to peel off after a week or two anyways.

Yeah, they got sued, but that’s no excuse. They know copyright-infringing audio exists on their platform, they have for a long time now. They could have stopped this from happening YEARS ago, and now that it’s finally caught up to them, they’ve given us a solution that doesn’t even work.

The problem isn’t fixed, and we’re left to clean up their mess yet again.

We made Roblox what it is, and they’re taking us for granted. This is not the first time Roblox has screwed us over, and I doubt this will be the last. To be frank, I’m not interested in developing here any more. I’d rather have to make and host my own servers than deal with someone breaking my game in some new crazy way every month.

Farewell, my fellow developers. May the Roblox team not screw you guys over this badly again… or… something. Ah, what the hell, they definitely will.

I GO TO GODOT
(edit: whoops i made a typo)

21 Likes
#3549

Roblox is becoming youtube.
Making garbage updates because they know theres no competition that can stop them.

5 Likes
#3550

I highly disagree, have you seen what people have been saying? The library is locked up, anything that is under 5.5 seconds (since they round it up for some reason) is now no longer allowed to be used, doesn’t matter if it was public in the first place. Smaller developers rely on the library, I am a small developer and I require the library for many different types of audios that I can’t afford to mass upload.

5 Likes
#3552

I was, joking??

Without us, there is no roblox.

Imagine if roblox removed dislikes lol

3 Likes
#3553

Without us, there is no Roblox

4 Likes
#3554

I have 2000 uploads. I own a emote game, I have to re-upload 150 audio assets. I rely on the library for sound effects, all the ones I have chosen being 2-5 seconds long. I have no issue with this update.

2 Likes
#3555

#1 would probably fix audio privating issues on games that use custom audio only uploaded by the accounts that made the audio for those games, which is a good thing. The only issue is that many of said games still use audios that are not owned by any accounts associated with the group or game, so at best it would mitigate the issue (probably sufficiently for the larger developers). Something is still better than nothing, though. #2 has been an ongoing issue for a while now, that I’m not even sure if Roblox will ever get around to mitigating/improving; however I agree that is something that should be looked into, as that could reduce cases of audios that are using copyrighted music without a license/express permission. #3 is a very interesting concept though, and could be used to mitigate copyright issues that caused this update in the first place (although it’s far too late to push this back now).

1 Like
#3556

remember scripting
remember how when sounds dont load errors occur
you know where im going with this :wink:

3 Likes
#3557

The only reason I think your completely fine is because you have 2000 uploads. How would it feel to be limited to 10 or 100 uploads?

2 Likes
#3558

After reading through the post and many of the replies, and seeing for myself what this is going to cause, I know Roblox is going to take a heavy blow from this. Many players are going to be confused about where the sounds in their favorite games went, or where the games themselves went.

Roblox has a history of making updates that everyone hates, we all know this. We’ve all come to know that new Roblox update = head to the dev forum see the new broken things. We’re tired of this.

Roblox, seriously just stop. In the original post, I don’t even see a reason for why you are doing this. Please correct me if I just overlooked it.
I used to want to work for Roblox some day. In developer relations and help developers to have a better experience on the Roblox platform. I can kiss those dreams goodbye. I now see working for Roblox would be a disgrace, in my view.

I don’t know if it’s possible for an update such as this to be reverted, and even if it is reverted, the damage has been done. Thousands of developers have already removed the audio from their game, and many games have already been impacted. This is going to absolutely destroy almost every single game I have created. This is the beginning of the end of Roblox. Can someone point me to another platform I can continue my programming on?

RIP Roblox (2006-2022)

6 Likes
#3559

That’s just you. Lots of other developers rely on lots of audios over 6 seconds.

1 Like
#3560

My game is scripted decently, my game still runs exactly the same when an audio asset id is equal to 0. In the possible future I can provide with scripts on how to fix this, but I don’t believe an entire script should stop over one (or a couple) audio/s, this update isn’t destroying games.

I agree, although I have no doubt in the future Roblox will inform us on how to get more uploads.

coughs record audio before update, upload it. Done.

1 Like
#3561

I heard Unreal Engine is really good, you could start there. Seems promising :wink:

3 Likes
#3562

I have 10 uploads per month. Lots of others also have 10 uploads a month. We can upload an ID to get 100 a month, but lots of us either don’t trust Roblox with information this sensitive or are too young to have a proper form of ID.

Now lets take your example of 150 audio assets to re-upload, except now you have 10 uploads a month. That’s a whole year of your game not having the sounds it used to. Alright, sure, you upload your ID, it gets accepted and you now have 100 audio uploads a month. That’s not quiet 150, so you’re still going to have to wait a whole month to replace the missing audio in your game.

Not everyone is as lucky as you are. At this point it might as well be luck, because who the hell knows what the criteria for 2000 audio uploads is. Roblox sure isn’t telling us.

3 Likes
#3563

Clearly the only way to solve this is to not make assets private, but instead replace them with 15 second - 3 minute music tracks.

#3564

Issue, what if they don’t know how to make audio, what if they lack the funds to make audio or hire someone to do it. what if roblox’s audio choices dont work. what if they can’t because they already used their 10 Uploads a Month. there’s many issues here.

AND I JUST CAN’T HANDLE THIS MESS ANYMORE!
This was My passion to make games for people, and Now it just hurts to see Roblox do this…

5 Likes
#3565

it uses c++ and that is a REAL headache
c++ sucks so much