Adding personal music

Is there a way to upload mp3s from my own computer, or do I just have to use the cloud search?

You could upload it to SoundCloud and then search for it on there :)

Are there copyright implications involved there? I've never used it so don't know if you can mark an upload as "private"

Good question. If you can mark it as private you probably couldn't search for it on Roll 20 anyway.

Also, I think the free account on SoundCloud is limited to 120 minutes, which isn't much. I'm trying to see if I can play music through a secondary TokBox window. It's a hack, but it'd basically let you broadcast anything you needed to.

I'm interested to see what sort of workarounds people find for this. While I think we'll look at other features later on down the line, for now SoundCloud is THE feature. Do be advised that the search we use automatically filters looking for "ambient" and... some other background elements that I for the life of me can't recall at this exact moment. So be sure to use tags along that line of thought.

I'm pretty sure you can get a user's tracks via the API, I might be wrong but you can probably get their private tracks too. Will probably need GMs to auth Roll20 to login to soundcloud using their auth token though.

Personal music would be a very useful enhancement. I've got lots of music that I regularly use in my gaming sessions. Finding new music is great but using my own music is better.

I've been looking for sound effects on soundcloud and haven't really found any yet. If I end up making my own, I'll upload them to soundcloud with roll20 in the name. This may be a good way to setup sound libraries...

Likewise. I've been searching through Soundcloud to find replacements for my own gaming soundtracks, but it's just not quite the same. I know it's not something that's likely to get into the first cut, but I think it *is* something that'd be useful for many of us.

If you could broadcast your own music to your players with roll20, I'd expect the music industry to shutdown roll2.net within days.

Awesome, thanks Riley.

We are looking at having a laptop join the group set to stream music via the "what you hear" option on the computer using TokBox. Soundcloud was.... disappointing. The idea is fantastic though.

Would it be possible to allow us to use a link directly to the SoundCloud file we want, rather than having to search for it?

I tested out the laptop sound server idea. There's a lot of fiddling with audio you have to do to make it tolerable. For one, on the sound server you have to mute everyone else's stream or you get feedback. You also have to make sure that all of your players are using mic only recording, and all players should use headphones. Again, this is to prevent feedback, which can get quite bad (when the music stopped there was a constant hum that lasted until the other player logged off, due to persistent echoes). Sound balance is kind of tricky here. I found that I had to have the sound turned way up on the sound server to get a reasonable result. If you take those steps, you get something that is workable. It does tend to have a lot of fizzing out, occasional sound glitches, etc though.

I just added an ambiental Minuet track to the Sound Cloud with the Ambient and Roll20 Tags. Let me know if you can find it on your searches.

I was surprised to find out that most of the music I want to use is already in Soundcloud, the problem I have is that since the search is filtered I can't access that music. So, I would suggest that much like the image search engine, you enable an option to do unfiltered searches. I think that is a simple way of solving a lot of problems.

You could upload it to SoundCloud and then search for it on there :) Or you could have it so you could paste the link in Roll20, which is a lot easier. Especially since it takes a while for it to appear in search after uploading a file to SoundCloud. Why would searching be a better option when you know exactly what it is you want? What happens if there are a bunch of similarly named files with the Roll20 tag on SoundCloud and your search doesn't bring up the file you want? You're kinda boned. I have a sound file I've made on my computer. To get it into Roll20, I have to upload it to SoundCloud, tag it with 'Roll20', then wait for a while so it'll appear in a search, then search for it through the Roll20 jukebox. That's a pretty cumbersome method to import it. These examples are a great reason to add a feature. Hopefully Riley can see its usefulness.

I uploaded a lot of podcast to Warhammer 2ed. Its about 15 of them, such as Altdorf night, Church, Nuln at night. I tagged them with "Roll20" or "roll20"

I have used a second computer/second skype account, Virtual Cable program and piped playable sounds through the soundboard computer's skype mic. sound effects are worthy of more experimenting. Background sounds...meh. Using Mixed output on your Skype mic lets you pipe in sounds as well, but cuts out your mic...enter Virtual Cable again and problem is worked around.