[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio

And what can I say about roblox free audio by roblox -

The moment you search the directory for the sound for your car using the keyword “engine” and you are poured over with bass songs created by roblox… :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:
:+1: :+1:

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There’s two parties at play here: Roblox, and the music industry. (None of this is concrete, but it’s my best guess given the way things are worded and how they’re doing this.) The music industry has to approve Roblox’s plan on how to manage audio, and I assume that this was their last resort, given the short amount of time given to comply, and how unfinished this plan is. They probably were hoping to come up with a better plan, but knew they had to cut their losses and just do something to satisfy them. I also do not want to forget that Roblox has investors now, and it’d be in their best interest to not need to pay others large sums if they can avoid it.

Audio that was specifically set to public by the uploader should stay public - forcing any existing public audio into private is not acceptable, as there are many developers who have gone out of their way to upload music for others to use and who are no longer active on the platform; their music, ambient sounds, and foley will no longer be available against their wishes and to the detriment of everyone using them.

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You know this update is bad when people are literally linking other game engines and recommending tutorials in this thread

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Not everybody feels comfortable with sharing their ID with roblox, and it truly sucks for these people. Not to mention the huge ammount of games that can not recover from such a blow to their songs.

I agree that they should have done something to remove copyrighted and bypassed songs, but they should have provided much more time for developers to fix this. Some games have thousands of sounds.

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I don’t really care what it is. The solution is unacceptable and must be fixed.

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As someone who had developed on this platform for over 5 years now
Are you serious?

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Roblox has always been notoriously bad with rolling out new changes… but this is a whole other level.

This change makes it so I can’t use sound effects I created in my own office with my own microphones, simply because they’re “private”… Do you really think forcing developers to re-upload hundreds of audio files is a healthy way to roll out this feature?

Your solution to all the backlash about it?

“You can make the audio public eventually, but that means other players can easily steal your sounds. Oh yeah and you can’t even do that for at least a week after we mute all your projects.”

And on top of that you’re planning on doing this for EVERY asset type from textures to meshes…

You guys do realize that your platform is built by the developers right? Why does it seem like every update is an unnecessary slap in the face.

I’m all for changing up the audio system, especially to protect artists and labels… But you don’t have to destroy every game on the platform with the rollout…

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I would like to hope that they are going to eventually revert the update, however I really don’t think it will happen.

aha, we’re going to have to upload 800+ audios to our group!
awesome.

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Your a legend for sending this

The solution is not ideal, but I’m hoping for darn heck that Roblox knows it too. Assuming the situation is true, they needed to come up with something, and this was their last resort with the time they had left. I assume they know they need to come up with something better, but it needs go through both parties, not just Roblox.

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Disappointed. Don’t even know why I am anymore, it is Roblox afterall… Christ.

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I agree - I think this was poorly executed but I feel like there has to be a reason to it.

Roblox hasn’t given any more insight so they may be a deeper part to this, guess time will tell

The solution to this doesn’t have to “go through both parties.” Safe harbor laws mean that, if Roblox adequately moderated copyrighted audio, record companies could do nothing. Youtube has copyrighted content uploaded constantly but they’re protected from prosecution due to DMCA safe harbor laws. Roblox is adopting this update because they were incompetent at moderating copyrighted audio, hence the continued existence of unedited Michael Jackson tracks on the audio catalog.

I totally agree with you, I myself don’t want to share my ID with Roblox which is a shame since it looks like it is going to limit me more and more as the time passes. Many of these controversial updates could be really good if Roblox made them in a different way, not focusing that much on the company and more on the developers. In any case, it is easy to say but hard to do, considering the 200M$ sue that music companies wanted to put on Roblox.

It is possible that this update gets reverted or adjusted at time before all those songs are gone considering that Roblox’s stocks are on its minimum right now, which definitely does not benefit Roblox.

Maybe that’s the only way that we’ve got to actually express what we want as developers and make Roblox apply the changes we want them to apply; complaining in mass. At the end of the day, this is not the only thing that we complain about, the main difference is that this affects everybody and other things, only to a little portion of developers. In my opinion, that’s a point to revise since it may be the sad but real way to make Roblox hear us.

I’m seeing a few big issues with this.

  • The fact that radio gamepasses will be rendered basically useless as a bunch of audio that people listen to will be deleted.

  • The fact that a lot of good SFX for stuff like weaponry or ambiance will be deleted, and by the fact ROBLOX uploaded audio is all weird and wacky music that no one would use for weaponry or ambience, there is clearly a big issue with this.

  • The last big issue is that this may carry over to other features in the future. As ROBLOX might consider this a “smart” idea.

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I’m a bit uninformed here, so I was taking a guess. Even so, I do think that Roblox had to do something. This still seems very odd of Roblox to do a change like this and present it in the incomplete state that it is. We’ve been given rough milestones of changes in the past (such as FIB, where we had phases of the update come out), but this is clearly not doing that. I feel like there is another force at play here, but I cannot put my finger on it.

Stop shilling another product
Godot is good and all
but right now lets focus on how this is going to affect a good 80% of games :slight_smile:

on another note, will there be a tool or a setting to migrate audios to a group?

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My biggest concern is the fact that we use 2 Roblox groups, one to develop and upload assets and one to release the games on. Both are owned by the same person, yet we need to upload everything to the group we use to release games on. We don’t even have most of the audio anymore saved on our pc. And it also means we have to re-upload over 100 audios just because they don’t allow multiple groups from the same owner to share audio.

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