Question Can I add copyrighted music pack for scenes to vamhub recourse page?

[HungryBobo]

Can I add copyrighted music pack for scenes to vamhub recourse page? Some of them will be edited for looping and all rendered in ogg to take up less disk space

 

[atani]

Probably shouldn't, but there's all kinds of copyrighted music shared already

 

[BlackMagic]

In the states, at least, if it is non profit and done for "Educational" purpose it is generally OK. That is why YouTube can exist. Didn't I read somewhere that Vam converts all audio to wav before it plays it?? Other than space considerations, would it be easier on VAM just to have it in wav form (inside an assetbundle of course)?

 

[MacGruber]

Can I add copyrighted music pack for scenes to vamhub recourse page?

Obviously not

I would recommend to try find free music you can use, there is plenty around.

For example https://www.free-stock-music.com/ is a good source. Got most music for my scenes from there. I think most songs there are under CC BY license only, you just have to credit the author. In some cases you can pay up to not even having to credit them.

In addition to crediting on the VaMHub resource page and in the VAR file credits, I usually put a TXT file with the required crediting wording next to the MP3 file...like this:

 

[MacGruber]

Didn't I read somewhere that Vam converts all audio to wav before it plays it??

On load VaM converts into some internal formats (there are 3 different ones, depending on the purpose of use). That's why loading audio in VaM takes so long. However, you can provide audio in form of an AssetBundle, so that conversion is done up-front in Unity Editor. Scene loading times can be 50-100x faster. For a handful of audios it may not matter, but if you have hundreds/thousands of audio files like some complex scenes, that becomes critical as loading time of your scene improves from minutes to seconds. To play Audio from AssetBundle you need to use LogicBricks (either SoundFromAB or RandomSoundFromAB).

 

[BlackMagic]

I had a short discussion with the lawyer my wife works for. I was correct - and wrong. You are legal to use copyrighted songs -UNTIL you distribute it. So you CAN NOT embed songs into a download as that is considered unlicensed distribution. drat! Which is why, he pointed out, YouTube try's to prevent downloads of music (kind of).

 

[BlackMagic]

So, is there any advantage for speed or quality of the format of sounds being put into the assetbundle? I know wav & FLAC files have a slight quality advantage over mp3, but is that lost when put into a bundle?
I don't mean to nag, I know you are very busy, but the engineer in me is curious.

 

[hazmhox]

God that thread is old

In the states, at least, if it is non profit and done for "Educational" purpose it is generally OK. That is why YouTube can exist.

Being a musician... I can't stress this enough, since it might be caught by someone and think it's true... this is very not true

"Educational purposes" and "non profit" does not allow you to use any kind of copyrighted content however you want. On top of that Youtube can exist "that way"... because they did not give a fuck years ago, and still kind of don't give a fuck today. Publishers got mad at some point which is what triggered the whole DMCA debacle.

You won't get sued if you pop up a Katy Perry song at your school with a bunch of teenagers... it still doesn't mean it's legal. But the second you use a very mainstream song and use it in your "non profit / educational" short movie, you will either immediately get taken down OR get commercial ads on your content that goes fully back to the owners.

This is a biased perception because of the internet. People also don't give a fuck about IP, copyrights and licences... so it is perceived as ok, but it's not the case legally speaking

Just like the stupid "7secs of a copyrighted is ok" is a very big urban legend. If you use a copyrighted material IN ANY SITUATION, you should licence it properly.

For instance, people think "sampling" is ok/free (like in rap or electronic music)... but (generally) all samples are cleared with the owner of the rights.

You are legal to use copyrighted songs -UNTIL you distribute it.

Again, sorry to disappoint, I don't know in what field your wife's lawyer work. But this is also not true sadly.

I'm saying that because I highly doubt you mean "you can use it in your scene just for you to watch it"... 'coz that would be the same as saying "your are allowed to play the CD you just bought in your living room"

Why do you think bars, restaurants or any public places have to pay an annual fee to play music? Because you can't broadcast copyrighted content without "licencing" it. That specific fee covers that for public places.

If you have not licenced the content, you cannot use it in any form of media that you will publicly release, period.

Your sentence would be true if "distribute" would mean "publish". But this would simply mean what I was saying above like playing a CD in your living room or in your car. Which is pointless in the context of art you would want to publish like on this hub

Can I add copyrighted music pack for scenes to vamhub recourse page? Some of them will be edited for looping and all rendered in ogg to take up less disk space

You can.
A lot of people here don't give a fuck and have copyrighted materials in their scenes.

On the other hand VaM's TOS mention you are responsible for the licence enforcement. So if any company would stumble upon your content and ask for removal, the team will immediately take it down without warning. And all the legal shenanigans would be adressed to you : )

I would avoid any mainstream content... especially very popular ones. But some artists are ok with sharing their music through different medias... obviously, never the ones behind big publishing companies.

 

[hazmhox]

So, is there any advantage for speed or quality of the format of sounds being put into the assetbundle? I know wav & FLAC files have a slight quality advantage over mp3, but is that lost when put into a bundle?
I don't mean to nag, I know you are very busy, but the engineer in me is curious.

Forgot to answer to that one:

• Speed advantage yes (huge)
• Quality advantage, depends if you make it high quality or low quality haha. But using OGG at 80% I would bet you'd never hear the difference compared to a lossless format without a comparison support and very specific sounds that are more subject to artifacting.
• Wav and Flac don't have a "slight quality advantage" over mp3, they are light years away because they are lossless formats. But when you reach a certain bitrate in either mp3 or ogg, just like the previous point, I think you will never hear the difference.
• You will not have native wav or flac in a game, that would be proposterous (the size is insane, so your memory would take a very huge hit for just a couple of sounds or music tracks). So you will be in ogg format most likely, which, properly configured will be extremely close to wav or flac.

Side information:

• never use mp3, always use ogg. Ogg is "perfectly loopable", mp3 is not due to the headers of the file.
• ogg is open source
• ogg has a greater quality output than mp3 for a very negligeable size difference

 

[MacGruber]

You will not have native wav or flac in a game, that would be proposterous (the size is insane, so your memory would take a very huge hit for just a couple of sounds or music tracks). So you will be in ogg format most likely, which, properly configured will be extremely close to wav or flac.

Sorry, have to correct you on that. For very short sounds you do indeed use PCM (=WAV). Like effect sounds that are less than a second but played often and lots in parallel, etc. Also because its lossless, it can deal well with noise, which is common for effects. For medium length sounds you might use ADPCM, which is also lossless, but has some minor CPU overhead. Only for long things like music you would use Vorbis/MP3, because of the mild CPU overhead and lag it introduces. There is also the option to decompress in memory after it was loaded from disk or long things like music can also be streamed from disk.

See Unity docs for all options:

Unity - Manual: Audio Clip

docs.unity3d.com

PCM	This option offers higher quality at the expense of larger file size and is best for very short sound effects.
ADPCM	This format is useful for sounds that contain a fair bit of noise and need to be played in large quantities, such as footsteps, impacts, weapons. The compression ratio is 3.5 times smaller than PCM, but CPU usage is much lower than the MP3/Vorbis formats which makes it the preferrable choice for the aforementioned categories of sounds.
Vorbis/MP3	The compression results in smaller files but with somewhat lower quality compared to PCM audio. The amount of compression is configurable via the Quality slider. This format is best for medium length sound effects and music.

 

[hazmhox]

Don't be sorry haha! This is very true Mac ^^

But I'm suggesting audio "best pratices" from a VAM perspective (without going too deep in the technical shenanigans because people not being coders/audio designers will tend to simply not care very much).

There is no instance in any scene where using PCM will have any "game changing" outcome for a scene or a plugin in our situation. By that I mean that, imagine you're pushing VAM to it's "heaviest situation" ( let's say, ultra settings with 3 or 4 characters all full soft physics )... and you have a bunch of sounds here, having them in PCM or OGG will not suddenly the scene work well and run at 200fps.

I suspect you're saying that because you are (potentially) used to very very big projects, and in those situation you might want to optimize the shit out of anything in the game and reduce some overhead you might have and free it for the visuals or AI... or whatever else might need a few milliseconds for.

Even in my case, I've worked on quite big projects, and I've never ever had to swap to PCM for resources purposes. If your culling or your prioritization on the audio is good enough, it's highly unlikely you'd ever need to swap to PCM.

On top of that, because it's very hard to discuss with people from the industry and a lot of knowledge is "gate keeped" ( for a frikkin reason I cannot start to comprehend but you know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), I'm always doing some "technological watch" and reverse engineering most of the ultra big games to check how they worked/handled their sounds.

99% of the time, the files are ogg, coming out of FMOD or Wwise.

If you read a bit about the industry overall, you might also remember the whole Assassin's Creed Valhalla debacle with stupidly compressed ogg files at 24000 which made the whole game sound very muddy.

Anyway, since very heavy CPU/GPU games nowadays don't go that far on the codec... from a VAM perspective, it's unlikely you would ever need to use PCM instead of OGG because your game performances are falling apart if you don't do that.

From a pure "data" perspective, I even prefer to have a slight "stutter" at the beginning of the scene like VAMMoan can do because it's loading the audio in memory, and properly compressed ogg files that are almost indistinguishable from PCM files... than a library that is 10 times the size on disk. Our hardware can handle the ogg overhead without much effort today.

If you're having overhead issues with audio you create in VAM then before anything else: you might be playing far too many sounds at once and not handling your stealing/culling properly. And even that case, I don't think we will ever see it in VAM... because honestly, what more do you need besides a handful of ambiant sounds, two or three characters "SFX voices" (moans) and maybe some voice acting.

Technical jibber jabber/discussion is always fun and interesting. But I think it's very important to contextualize recommandations. And 99.5% of creators around here can use (and should use) ogg without second thoughts.