As a Roblox developer, I rely on the expectation that audio will work in my experience after I’ve uploaded it. This expectation however is broken with the current behavior of audio permissions.
Currently, if audio is uploaded, it has to be manually whitelisted in all experiences you want to use it in, even if those experiences are under the same group the audio was uploaded to! This is extremely time consuming and problematic to my workflow, as someone who has multiple universes for a single game (production & test environments).
Audios that are uploaded to a group should automatically work in any experience under that group. While we do have the “whitelist all” feature when publishing a place file from studio, my workflow does not involve manual publishing. I instead invoke cloud APIs to publish my places, meaning I cannot make use of this feature.
If Roblox were to make audios automatically work in any experience under the same group / owner account, this would improve dev productivity significantly as I wouldn’t have to manually whitelist all of my game’s environments for every single audio I upload.
Thanks for request this and agree that the behavior needs to be improved here. The reason we by default don’t allow audio to be used in the owner’s experience is we wanted to prevent leaks where e.g. a bad actor guesses an assetId and loads it within an experience to preview it before the publisher is ready to share that asset with the world. But we need to figure out a way to prevent leaks that doesn’t disrupt your workflows. I’ll talk to the team and see what we can do here.
Yes, please. The amount of updates we’ve rolled out only to learn the audio wasn’t approved for our players… Can really bomb a planned release if you don’t check for it.
The most misleading thing is we can hear the audio. There should be a banner or something warning you about unpublished audio in your experience.
fwiw — A whitelist that contains all IDs allowed for that game. This way, if it’s not in the whitelist (I.e owner doesn’t want to release yet), there’s no point in guessing because it’s not in the whitelist.
Maybe a “permission simulator” would be useful at this point, i.e. launching a test session with the place ID spoofed as another. I publish to another game when I release updates because I have a staging game, so this would be very helpful to me.
We are soon closing to a year since this issue was posted. What did the team say?
A lot of developers have test experiences (where we allow access only to certain people in the group). However, the audio doesn’t work there. Manually whitelisting each track is NOT a solution. We have over 100-200 sounds that need to be manually updated.
I’m running into this problem as well. I have over 100 sounds that need to be whitelisted for a game. I don’t know what the engineers were thinking when they came up with this idea.
This is still required. In studio, the game plays all the sounds I need. I SPECIFICALLY gave permission. Then, in the public version, it’s silent. It’s stupid because some of these sounds are owned by the group that the game is under?? This happens for all my games at random.
While we’re at it, give us a way to REMOVE a game from the permissions list under an audio. Why do I have to archive my audio entirely if I want to restrict a game from using it?
I second this, especially because we have an automated publishing workflow. Our code is hosted with GitHub, the assets are hosted on Roblox. This is being published to a QA game and after approval published to our production experience.
For audio, we would have to whitelist all experiences manually or have our development places part of our production universe (which makes things harder to work with).
Audio leaks do not impact us severely, and you can eventually make this feature opt-in as toggle.
Yes this is absolutely critical for proper workflow. I often want to throw my computer out the window when I have to manually set 100+ unique audio permissions on every one of my other places that use the same audio within the same group. A huge pain, it really needs to be addressed.
fwiw — A whitelist that contains all IDs allowed for that game. This way, if it’s not in the whitelist (I.e owner doesn’t want to release yet), there’s no point in guessing because it’s not in the whitelist.
Why is this still an issue? Why do I, the owner of both ‘universes’ under the same group, need to individually grant permissions for every damn audio file I upload? This is nonsensical, it’s complete garbage and needs to be fixed. I can’t even properly make a experimental branch because there are thousands of audio files that I need to track down and manually approve.
