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NEW RESOURCE SECTION: Music & Sound

Archian

Site Director
Level 61
Joined
Jan 1, 2006
Messages
3,046
newsoundsection-png.382780




Greetings Community!

The Workshop forges continue to blaze! We have added a brand new resource section: Music & Sounds!
This section has been on our to-do list for many years, and now it's finally here!

Users can now upload custom-made audio files in MP3 format under the following types:

  • Ambient
  • Dialog
  • Music
  • Sound effects / SFX
  • Unit soundset
    • HINT - Members can link sounds to a specific model! If you want to submit a soundset or specific sounds for a model, you must upload it to the Sounds section, then edit the model and add the soundset under "Assets".
But how to know if a sound match the one you are looking for without having to download it first? View in 3D doesn't work with sounds, obviously, so instead: Hear a preview by playing the music / sound directly from your browser!

Be advised that sound / music submissions are subject to moderation and must not violate the site rules. Also note that specific sound submission policies are missing at the moment, but will be added soon enough.

NOTICE - This new resource section needs reviewers and moderators, please see our current
Job Openings thread, for a list of all open staff positions.
 

Kyrbi0

Arena Moderator
Level 44
Joined
Jul 29, 2008
Messages
9,487
Heck yeah baby!

I know there's never been (& even with Reforged, still isn't) a great way to implement custom sound-sets (at least without replacing existing sound-sets. which is problematic for several reasons), but I still think it should be something we talk about & work on.

Personally I think voice-acting is a neat avenue of modding that has been basically un-tapped through most of Wc3 modding history, and that's a shame, as it's really democratizing; sure, few of us have professional gear, but nearly everyone has a smart-phone & a cardboard box with a towel, and you can make some decent stuff that way I think.


Also seems like a "good" time to plug the 4th Voice-Acting Contest I never really got up off the ground...
 
Level 48
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
8,416
I love this. About time, I hope people are still willing to contribute. Imagine the trove of resources this section could have had had it been here all along. :D

First!

The implementation is a little bit barebones, but we are very much open for feedback as to how to make it better, both tag/rules/description wise but also the technical implementation.

I've got a couple of things in mind. First of all I think a separation like "Classic Models" and "Reforged Models" should exist for Unit Soundsets, Music and Ambient/SFX. Secondly I think each of those should have a "Ported" section (unless there are serious issues with copyright and such, but if it works for models, skins and icons I don't see why it can't for sounds!).

And another little thing. When you preview a sound but click away, the sound keeps playing on that page but you can't stop it without re-previewing it. It would be best if the sound stopped playing when you click away from the pop-up. Also, it would be tidier if there was no pop-up at all and the sound preview happened on the same page, e.g, clicking the Play button would simply start playing the sound rather than open a small pop-up:
1625692749431.png
 
Secondly I think each of those should have a "Ported" section (unless there are serious issues with copyright and such, but if it works for models, skins and icons I don't see why it can't for sounds!).
This would probably work just fine for exported sound files like dialogue lines or sound effects taken from the HOTS Casc file system for example, but it also opens up for people to upload and share music files, which does indeed come with some issues related to copyright.

Having one or two copyrighted music files on Hive is probably not a problem. If the ones who owns the licensing rights to the track files a DMCA takedown not much will happen, other than Ralle having to remove the track from the website within a given time. That is no problem at all.

However, when this becomes a frequent thing, where a website repeatedly receives DMCA takedown requests there will be some penalties on the domain level. Not only that, but the web host may not condone such behavior, and may get you in trouble with them. I'm not sure, but it may also hurt the SEO, and lead to possible de-indexing from various search engines.

We also face the same possibility happening with the ported assets that are currently uploaded, but from what I have heard Blizzard doesn't care about their ported models being spread around, as long as they're not being monetized. That's also an issue with uploading music clips. Every time a music clip is listened to outside of its intended platform the original owner loses potential revenue, which makes it a bit different from using the ported models (which aren't monetized by Blizzard in the same way a music clip is monetized on YouTube). They can then possibly file a lawsuit over the lost potential revenue. Since metrics such as downloads are on public display it will be very easy to calculate lost revenue. The actual revenue lost is more than likely minuscule, and not worth suing over, but the possibility is still there.

What ported models from other games are concerned, Hive's ported asset section is just not big enough to be on the radar for those who created them in the first place, but if Hive does get a DMCA complaint on any of them, they will have to take those assets down within a specific time frame.
 
Pretty neat section and a great addition to Hive!

The only hiccup I had was when I wanted to upload multiple sounds to the same resource. We’re forced to add sounds one by one and the site told me to slow down because I wanted to add them too fast.
I believe the skin section allows us to add multiple textures before we upload, so I think this could be improved.

Other than that, great job! Looking forward to see this section take off :thumbs_up:
 

Kyrbi0

Arena Moderator
Level 44
Joined
Jul 29, 2008
Messages
9,487
Another suggestion; it would be neat to be able to "play all" in sequence; just queue up an entire collection of sounds to listen to in order.

Also, is there any thought to providing a place for/requiring uploaders to provide a written version of the lines being provided? a readme.txt for Sound files, mayhaps?
 

Rui

Rui

Level 41
Joined
Jan 7, 2005
Messages
7,550
Nicely done!

I too had doubts because of DMCA. Regardless, let's look at it this way: we want a section full of original sounds & music. Takedown requests will only help us keep the section clean.

PROPOSAL: Allow sound resources to be links to assets off-site. I'm thinking of this thread (with little to no visibility): Sharing My Music and Sound FX - Over 2000 Tracks. Uploading two thousand sound SFXs and music would be painful, and if Hive is having storage issues, we might as well take advantage of the fact it's already stored elsewhere.
 

deepstrasz

Map Reviewer
Level 68
Joined
Jun 4, 2009
Messages
18,706
Maybe add tags for the mood of a track? Like upbeat/moody/victory/defeat/etc.
I guess the tag system should follow the same or a similar trend as in the other resource sections: race/faction, game, medieval, science-fiction etc. Stuff like genres could be useful: rock, orchestral, electronic etc.

Great, I want to do some voice acting. Btw. where is the Sound section icon on the start page?

anima.png
 
Why does this not allow FLAC or WAV uploads? I was going to upload some custom soundsets for units that I made years ago, but until Reforged all soundsets had to be WAV as I recall. Maybe you could get them to be MP3 but certainly the ingame soundsets were not MP3 so it was inconsistent with the game to be making MP3 unit sounds. Also, the game (at least in the past) deeply required that unit soundsets be mono and not stereo, and at the time I had the best success making WAVs to do that.
 

Ralle

Owner
Level 77
Joined
Oct 6, 2004
Messages
10,101
Why does this not allow FLAC or WAV uploads? I was going to upload some custom soundsets for units that I made years ago, but until Reforged all soundsets had to be WAV as I recall. Maybe you could get them to be MP3 but certainly the ingame soundsets were not MP3 so it was inconsistent with the game to be making MP3 unit sounds. Also, the game (at least in the past) deeply required that unit soundsets be mono and not stereo, and at the time I had the best success making WAVs to do that.
Does real Warcraft allow FLAC and WAV?

If not, when Warsmash supports proper multiplayer, I will add these formats :D
 
Ah, so if someone uploads a soundset, it has to be WAV to be the proper filename?
Turns out you can replace internal sounds (which are all FLAC by default) with mp3 files and they'll work fine, but I think it'd be good to allow WAV and FLAC uploads anyway since they are supported and they don't have the compression problems that mp3 files have (also because if I'm not wrong, you can't loop an mp3 seamlessly)
 

deepstrasz

Map Reviewer
Level 68
Joined
Jun 4, 2009
Messages
18,706
How do you import custom sounds? I cant find tutorial. I want to use them as voice on units?
Searching can do wonders:
 
I think you might be dismissing it too quickly.

If you think about movies there's typically a few genres you can give each scene. Like:

Victory
Romance
Sneaky
Despair

It's not something we should dismiss out of hand. But perhaps it just need a bit more work to figure out what's useful.
perhaps it could be author-specified tags and there could be a collapsible list of tags that gets updated when new tags are specified by authors?
 
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