Provide a system for us to play *personally* owned music to friends through sound systems or boomboxes in-game

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

With the ongoing audio privacy changes on the platform, I’ve been thinking a lot about potential ways to resolve the issue of music distribution rights and what I believe are legitimate use cases for playing and streaming music to friends in the metaverse.

In real life, playing music to friends at a party is as simple as just buying a CD or a digital copy of a song, and playing/streaming it over a speaker. Similarly, DJs purchase the music they play or have demo files passed around to them by the artists who produced that music.

As such, I want to propose that Roblox provide some kind of feature that allows us to stream music that we personally own through a streaming service. It would not be uploaded as sound file assets, it would be an iterable, per-person collection that developers can pull from and play on behalf of the user in one game instance at a time, as long as that player is in the game.

This would allow for the existing radio gear feature to be preserved, but in a way that respects music copyright and real world ownership of music. The scope of this feature is evidently huge and will take awhile, but I hope to see the preservation of the current music eco-system on Roblox.

92 Likes
[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio
[Update] Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio
#2

SoundService:UserIsAuthorisedToPlaySound() sorta API, where the method only works if the user is in the active session?

local SoundService = game:GetService("SoundService")

local function playAssetId(userid, soundid)
  if not SoundService:UserIsAuthorisedToPlaySound(userid, soundid) then
    --put an error here or smth
    return
  end

  --play the audio
end

or, Sound:PlayOnBehalf(userid), as thats probably easier to implement

7 Likes
#3

If the current decision for this huge change was due to a lawsuit from the music companies, I don’t see this flying either. While I don’t know the legal text of the major vendors of personal music you “own” copies of, I imagine the terms of service cover you legally being allowed to listen to it, but not you and your friends listening to it. Even if it wasn’t the case, I imagine there is money to be had making it that way. Legal stuff is a muddy topic, and with the threat of lawsuits, I don’t see Roblox wanting to do this.

4 Likes
#4

Well they had a lot of time to figure this out and the tools they have given us is a joke. I have to re-upload sounds that I BOUGHT rights to use, unacceptable.

audio discovery plugin is really nice though

@metatablecatmaid in terms of API we can’t pass in UserId because that is easily by-passable, it should require the Player instance instead.

5 Likes
#5

Which I think is draconian and nonsense given how it works in the real world. If the metaverse is ever going to be taken seriously, this needs to be amended.

19 Likes