Bring back sort options for audio search / Fix library search 404s

[DataBrain (Amber)]

As a roblox developer, searching for good audio in the past few weeks has become an abysmal experience.

Roblox’s audio search used to have sort aggregations:

Now these are gone completely.

This coincides with the recent controversial change to audio privacy:

[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio

Developers, We are making important changes to the way privacy works for audio, giving you more control over how your assets are used across the platform. On March 22, all new audio uploaded will be Private and all existing audio longer than 6 seconds will be set to Private. To help you prepare for these changes, we are announcing the following: Starting today, all audio uploads are free. To support this change, there are now monthly limits on how many audio assets you can upload. Thresho…

Because these free audio tracks typically have a lots of useless tags in their description, it can be very difficult to search for audio by the default sort. Often times, I have better luck searching by “Updated”, for example, since this tends to randomize the pool/group audio in a better way to shop around. Now it’s much more difficult.

With these buttons gone, I did the normal developer thing of trying to go to the webpage and change the “SortAggregation” GET parameter:
https://www.roblox.com/develop/creator=1/browse.aspx?CatalogContext=2&Subcategory=16&CreatorID=1&SortAggregation=5&LegendExpanded=true&Category=9

Unfortunately, unless you specifically put ROBLOXSECURITY, RBXID, and a number of other tokens in the request header, roblox will now return a 404 whenever you go to ANY library search URL. This is quite the downgrade from the old system.

So I did the normal developer thing and intercepted the XHR request, trying to replay it in nodejs until I can figure out how to sort my search for audio. It seems there’s been a number of changes to the audio search backend, as I am only seeing a request (with lots of required authentication tokens of course), and instead of an easy, self-documented restful API, I get a caching request that downloads a GZIP file. At this point I decided to just give up, as I don’t think it’s worth that much effort just to try to dig through roblox’s chaotic mess that is the new sounds, which includes a few gems scattered among a bunch of low-quality, background-noisy audio.

While the website is better for scrolling through pages, it doesn’t have options for searching by sound length. So I am stuck with studio’s Toolbox widget.

It makes no sense that roblox would pair the release of all these new sound effects with a backend change that removes essential features and makes it very difficult to actually search for and sift through the new audio.

[colbert2677 (Dreamseeker)]

@DataBrain

With these buttons gone, I did the normal developer thing of trying to go to the webpage and change the “SortAggregation” GET parameter:

For me I add the SortType parameter:

https://www.roblox.com/develop/library?CatalogContext=2&Subcategory=16&CreatorID=1&SortAggregation=5&LegendExpanded=true&Category=9&SortType=3

You can’t use default pagination though because the parameter will get removed if you click any of the arrow buttons at the bottom of the page. You have to add the PageNumber parameter to paginate and every time you want to turn the page you need to increment the number and enter the URL.

https://www.roblox.com/develop/library?CatalogContext=2&Subcategory=16&CreatorID=1&SortAggregation=5&LegendExpanded=true&Category=9&SortType=3&PageNumber=2

[CountLoops]

Thanks for sharing this feedback! We are actively working on ways to improve audio discovery while making sure to mitigate spam. Stay tuned for more updates here.