The state of neglect it’s been in is abysmal. You cannot find anything worthwhile on it anymore.
It used to be my go to place for finding a trove of small sound effects, basic things like gun sound effects, bullets hitting metal, metal scraping or hitting metal for swords, etc etc.
This post and a few below it sums up my frutration.
Ever since offsale audio has become unsearchable on top of being the default setting for new sounds, it’s pretty much destroyed the utility of the sound catalog for anything outside of copyrighted music/ meme songs.
On top of that, Roblox themselves have nuked the Sound Library with poorly named royalty free music files. (If you want to find anything related to metalic sounds, good luck sifting through the HUNDREDS of Roblox sounds that are labelled “Metal Hit”, “Metal Clang”, “Metalic bash 1” etc)
Its presence is a cause for frustration. There is only a handful of actual sound effects in a sea of royalty free (or blatantly copyrighted) music. Roblox doesn’t seem to be remedying this in anyway with some kind of “sound length” search option, and the way the library presents itself urges you to just find/ rip and upload your own sounds.
Sounds that aren’t marked as “Free” are not for your legal use. You’re not meant to use other developers’ uploaded assets unless they have specifically marked it as such with “Free”. Read the TOS.
Not being able to search non-free audio is great for professional developers because it helps protect developer assets from unwanted use. If I make and upload a particular sound for my game I do not want other developers to use it without my explicit permission.
You’re free to (encourage others to) upload sounds for general use that they have the rights to and mark them as free to take.
I’m fine with people using my sounds and assumed they could use it until I learned I had to find the page of the audio, configure, set it to allow copying, and save for each one I want public.
If they had an option on audio upload (defaulted to allow copying) for you to keep the sound private, that would be better.
99% of sounds uploaded by other devs were just sounds found elsewhere online or ripped straight from real games. If people were persistent enough they could take the ID of the sound in your game anyway, post it into a url, and fetch the sound file regardless. (Or just outright record the sound)
An opt in to hide your specific assets seems reasonable. It being default and totally scalping the audio library made the site feature useless, which is why they should bite the bullet and delete it in my opinion. They want us to record (rip) our own sound files anyway, right?
I assume Roblox will patch out the ability to use assets outside of games by whoever owns the asset (if not marked as Free) eventually.
You should make a feature request for that – this thread has no chance.
Btw it’s not a great idea to publicly insinuate you are using assets by other creators (on/off-platform) illegitimately, it makes you come across as really unprofessional. Also just because the culture is currently the way it is (due to the developer base being too young to understand asset rights and there currently being a lack of consequences for illegitimate use) doesn’t mean it is desirable to perpetuate it.
I don’t find it convincing to say developers earnestly want their sounds private because they worked hard to make them when I know for a fact that almost everyone finds the sounds they use online. I play lots of games and notice Source games/ anime/ Nintendo sound effects all the time in very popular games.
I’m sorry if I came across as acusing everyone of stealing sounds, I just meant to imply there’s probably a huge majority who, at least in principle, don’t mind sound sharing.
This aged quite well…we now have a better privacy system (and free uploads) but the non-Roblox audio marketplace is “temporarily” closed down for no given reason (leaving us with only audio by Roblox and Monstercat apart from upload limits) and many songs / sounds were made private because of a situation allegedly caused by their own negligence (which that negligence is being continued regarding other things) and was thus probably the most disruptive change in the history of the platform.
Bump, this is still a major problem. I have had extreme difficulty finding any audio because I always get irrelevant search results. Using length search does not work because it will return 5 second clips of a song with names that do not even match the search.
