[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio

A bit short notice for games that let people use audios like Radios or DJ tables :frowning: It makes sense as a long term move but the intentions should’ve been announced sooner

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I heavily disagree with the changes being made in this thread for numerous reasons. This breaks and compromises many of our currently used assets in projects, forcing us to reupload or change them for different ones.

As detailed in the thread, Roblox plans to make audio assets private in the sense that:

  1. Audios that are over 6 seconds will automatically be privated.
  2. Only people who have access to a private audio can use it.
  3. Access to an audio is dependent on if the user owns the audio, or the audio is uploaded to a group that the user can access the Group Creations of.

This means that all audios after March 22, 2022 will no longer be usable by games and users unless they specifically have access to it. What this means is:

  • Any audios that are private will no longer be usable by anyone but the owners of that audio. This critically sets back numerous games made over the course of a decade as many of them most likely utilize private audios, or audios that were at one point public, but then made private. Many developers (including the ones for a game I work on) find it more reasonable to upload audios directly to their account, especially since they’ll be able to use the audio before it gets approved (which does not work with a group as far as I can tell).
  • All in-game user interfaces that allow you to manually put in your own audio IDs will no longer work with nearly any sound uploaded. As a direct consequence of this, this breaks any and all game passes and paid products that allow players to input their own music, namely Boombox and Radio game passes. This effectively means that anyone who has brought these game passes will have practically been scammed out of what they originally paid for, through no fault of their own or the game developer. While yes, Roblox is giving us the option to use royalty free music, I doubt that many players would really want to go and listen to that as opposed to music they are actually interested in.

My own project has many of its audios uploaded directly to my account. Another team I work for has a project where many of the audios are scattered between several different accounts of team members. In both projects, we’re going to have to reupload these audios and republish our games just because of this change.

This is unacceptable, we should not have to do any of this. We shouldn’t have to go back and change things that were perfectly fine before on a whim. It’s already bad enough that we have to worry about the animation runtime and blending update for our projects, but this is pushing us over the edge, especially given the short notice of under 2 weeks.

The negatives of this update drastically outweigh any positives that free audio uploads might bring. I cannot in good faith support any of this update as a result.

I cannot believe that anyone at Roblox thought that this was a good idea. I cannot articulate how angry and upset me and many of my friends and co-workers are at this update. This change is a giant punch in the face on top of an ever-growing mountain of dissatisfaction and frustration I have with this platform.

I want to make games on this platform, I want to have fun doing it, and I want others to have fun playing and making games too, I really do. But this feels like I’m practically being spat on.

190 Likes

Audio usage is organic

People spread IDs to friends, and onward, and the best propogates to the top.


Sound packs which are Open Source models, bear not explicitly Open Source soundDs.

This is AGAINST the intent of the uploader, who couldnt be inconvenienced with public-setting all the audios. Retroactive ruling is explicitly defiant to developer intentions in a myriad of instances.


Its so problematic, because so much of the audio we use has propogated to us organically, through friends and connections. This explicit, hard knucking retroactive ruling is going to cause us some missing phalanges.

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The free audio is an awful compensation for making developers responsible for audio they did not upload. Update sucks. Revert immediately.

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Good afternoon, we would like to know why a group of developers have an amount of 2,000 free audios to upload, which in my case, for example, I am not used the function previously: what would be the criteria applied for these varied quantities? Thanks

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This is the would be the absolute WORST change you guys would have thought of doing if I’m reading this correct. If we have audios in our games that were not made by us, they won’t work now?? Please clarify.

Edit: WOWW, half of my audios in my HUGE sized horror game map have to be replaced now… Game ruined there just like that. I stand even stronger with what I said now. Please undo this stupid update. There’s nothing positive about it, literally.

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This is pretty ridiculous. I can’t even use audio I’ve uploaded from my personal account in my own group games?



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Does this only apply to private audios?

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Glad that the change has happened, but would really appreciate an understanding of why some developers get 2000 and some only 100. I’m a developer on the same terms as my colleagues, and they’ve all gotten the 2000 limit while I have the 100.

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I completely agree. everything you touched on here is exactly how i feel.

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If the audio is not uploaded by you, you will not be able to play it in your game I think.

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Especially, what if a certain game needs audio, music, etc. To make the game stand out? This will bring more problems to it more than fixing this issue.

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The free audio upload is very useful, but I still don’t understand how some people get 100 and others 2000 free audios per month (Even though both accounts have Verified ID).

I also wanted to stress that this will break many game sounds, especially “Radio”, “Boombox” or “Music” gamepasses.

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Use alt accounts for testing, that will help.

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Awesome change with free audio, now I can finally make my own lol. As for the cap on uploads however, won’t people use alts? I hope this has been taken into consideration. Also, are we able to pay for more after our allotted amount for free is used up?

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I have 2000 free audios per month.

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I have a game which uses a big background music playlist to play which I picked from Roblox Toolbox, this new change is frustrating for me.

The only good thing I see in this new change is the ability to upload audios for free, and the asset protection.

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Exactly this. Every day I get closer to no longer make games here because of complete nonsense that people would only need to worry about while making games on Roblox.

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So I just tried checking the audio discovery tool and was immediately greeted by a host of audio assets I’ve uploaded myself that apparently need to be changed, because this is a group game and I am not the group owner (despite being a developer with edit access).

Am I to believe based on this that the system does not check if the player has edit access, but rather just if the asset is owned by the group or group owner?

There are countless games that use audio uploaded by developers onto their individual accounts. This seems a bit silly to me.

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I can’t imagine how many games are gonna fall dead silent with the new privacy settings. I’m overall not looking forward to this update, but hey at least we have free audio uploading now. We shall see how this unfolds.

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