Allow to play sounds in reverse

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to play sounds in reverse.
Making a loop and changing TimePosition downwards does not give an accurate result.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because this allows to play a sound in reverse perfectly.

35 Likes
#2

I wholeheartedly agree with allowing us to reverse audio and using TweenService to do it is a little buggy. However, with that being said, it may be more difficult to moderate, and could easily allow for bypassed audio.

2 Likes
#3

This used to be a feature, setting PlaybackSpeed (Pitch as it was named back then) to a negative value would reverse the sound. Not sure when or why that feature got removed but it sure would be nice to have back so I’m not uploading two copies of sounds to get the reversal effect. This is especially helpful to me when I’m developing horror experiences.

11 Likes
#4

As much as I love the idea of this, it’s outright never happening due to it being abusable for inappropriate or copyrighted audios.

For example: Lets say you wanted to upload a song which 100% would get nuked by whatever label its under. All you have to do is reverse it before uploading and bam, no copyright bot on earth could pick it up (without of course needing to scan the song twice, once normally and once in reverse, which is just a waste of time and resources) - From there, devs can just play the song in reverse (or add an option for users to play stuff in reverse) and you have easy copyrighted music.

4 Likes
#5

What stops someone from uploading an audio at this current point in time, slowed pre-upload to 0.25x speed, then in-game played @ 4x speed? (or any other speed that wouldn’t effect the quality too much)

18 Likes
#6

For those worried about moderation:
The worst case to solve this is to make moderation at the end reverse the audio and check if thats innanpropriate too.

2 Likes
#7

I asked a lead audio engineer about this six years ago. He basically confirmed that allowing audio to be played in reverse makes for easy bypassing. Don’t get me started with how I was inadvertently able to hear swear words (loud and clear) simply by playing Kanye West’s New Slaves backwards.

1 Like
#8

Unfortunately people are going to abuse this but I absolute support this feature.

Currently to play something in reverse you have to upload the same audio twice and manually keep track of time to play the reversed audio.

I would honestly love this feature as it would be cool for DJ games, audio scrubbing, cool effects.

Roblox honestly lacks the ability to manipulate audio in a cool way.
I’d love to have the ability to make synthesizers and manipulate samples through code.

3 Likes
#9

The moderation problem for this could likely be solved by requiring you to use up 2 of your monthly uploads on a single asset to compensate for the audio having to be listened to in reverse. This could then give access to playing the audio in reverse.

3 Likes
#10

Just because there’s a way to bypass moderation with a engine feature doesn’t mean the feature shouldn’t be added, what, are they going to remove the ability to code because people can create inappropriate content with generated bricks?

7 Likes
#11

I doubt this would be abused as often as people are making it out to be.

There are actual developers who would LOVE to have a feature like this. The bad apples shouldn’t be the only reason why we cant have a feature like this.

Besides, audio creators now have to grant permissions & also have edit access to a game. Seeing something like this being abused would probably be on rare occasions.

This would now be a great time to add a feature like this back - support!!

(pls we need more audio features)

10 Likes
#12

It’s impractical to search both ways for swear words in audio. On top of that, the system likely doesn’t know how to moderate stuff said or sung in Shilgne. Imagine being banned for saying ‘come for it’ because it sounds a bit like ‘hirrof(m)uc’. Make sure the M isn’t pronounced at all while you’re at it!

1 Like
#13

Well you can always reverse the audio and upload it (ps. now its free to upload so this seems like a better solution)

But if you have a situation where you need to use a script to do so, then it might come in handy!

#14

Just like it is impractical for moderators to look through every line of game code to make sure there’s nothing inappropriate, but that doesn’t mean it should be removed. As I implied before, just because something can’t be moderated or you might have some people abusing it (the “bad apples” as @Floo_d mentioned in their reply) does not mean that feature shouldn’t be added!

May I mention that uploadable/custom meshes were added in 2016 - 6 years ago, because “Roblox changed”? They weren’t added before because of moderation, but because “Roblox changed” they were reconsidered.

3 Likes
#15

You can already upload reversed sounds and simply play them correctly, albeit it being very choppy by manually setting the Sound.TimePosition.

The only thing that would change is the audio quality and not having to upload a sound again in reverse.

So to me this all seems like a non-issue.