Impossible/No Thanks Music Corner?

[FalChromiforme]

I was wondering if, in some future update to the creative corner, there could be an option to add Audio files to the creative corner. Just little songs I wrote and sung myself/made on my Launchpad. In addition to this, would song arrangements/mashups be OK as long as I cited previous owner and made/sung the mashup/cover/arrangement myself?

 

[Teapot]

You're not the only one here who makes music, so it's certainly worth thinking about. I'll have a ponder, and chat to the other members of staff, and see if it's an idea worth pursuing.

 

[Teapot]

Okay, basically the conclusion we came to is "not yet."

The reason for this is moderation - we can moderate visual or written works pretty easily, and we have the tools available to track down whether they are the artist's own work, or whether they're stolen. Unfortunately, no such tools exist for audio as far as I am aware - and either way, we'd have to sit and listen to the entirety of each audio work in each and every instance. As the staff all do this in what little spare time we get, it would be too time-consuming to enforce the Corner rules for audio. If we wouldn't get stolen works and random bits of music uploaded all the time, or had more resources available to moderate the Corner, we'd be very interested in the idea, believe me.

Unfortunately, for now I have to mark this as impossible, although certainly an idea I'd want to revisit in the future.

 

[Silver-Solis]

Actually, there is an easier way to moderate it, though it would still require manual moderation.

There is an application called sound hound, which is a program that recognizes music. If it doesn't come out with a result it means that it is either totally original, or not clear enough.

As for moderation of the music corner, I feel like the community is capable of doing most of it on there own, when it comes to inappropiate music and such.

Moderation would really come down to plopping sound files into Sound Hound.

A nice system would be kind of like the like system we already have, but just 5 stars, more stars, higher chance to be featured.

 

[Teapot]

Well, something like Soundhound would inherently involve us downloading every single piece of music uploaded and putting it through the application, which is time consuming, and wouldn't scale well if people uploaded a lot of music (we don't have that many staff members, after all). If they had some sort of API so I could program the Corner to do it itself, that'd be easier, but there's other problems associated with that. Even with an automatic system, though, some degree of manual listening would be required to screen for false negatives or false positives. Ultimately, there are options to make a music or video work type possible, but we're not currently in the right place as a community to explore them.

As for a "star rating" system, I've never been a fan of them – whenever they're used in a community setting, it just winds up that 5 stars is "good" and everything else is "varying levels of bad," which defeats the point of a more nuanced system. It's also prone to cause drama – for example, someone might get into a fight with another member, and then decide to 1-star everything that person had made.

 

[Silver-Solis]

That makes sense, and I do see where that would cause issues (for both ideas). For the false negatives you could make a appeal system (though kinda defeats the purpose of low human moderation), and the community might be able to fish out false positives. Kind of like the appeal system Youtube has (But they have much more resources), but in a much smaller community. Things still get through youtube, so that proves nothing is perfect.