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Using Copyrighted Music

I'm looking into reinstating an old table-top campaign that's based in the late 1800's. When I was gathering folks around the table, I bought a few albums from Amazon MP3 that had songs originally composed during that time, many of them by a character I stuck in the campaign. I'd like to be able to reuse the tracks for atmosphere (most people have no idea what the music would sound like), but I'm not quite sure how to go about it on Roll20. Challenges: I wear a headset to game, like many do, in order to prevent feedback or quality issues. This poses a problem to playing the music locally and streaming it over my mic, which seems like a cheesy hack anyway. It's actual old music, not something I'm responsible for creating. Purchased from the Amazon MP3 store, it's DRM free and available for play virtually anywhere. That said, making it publically available probably lands me with a lawsuit for royalties. All of the Jukebox options appear to simply stream from SoundCloud. Terms of Service over there are pretty clear about presenting this as my material, in that plagiarism is outright forbidden and I don't see anywhere to provide credit. How has the community at large gone about trying to serve up their personal "jukeboxes" in cases like this?
If you're on a Mac, I suggest buying NiceCast. That's what we use.
I googled "How to play music over Skype" and found this I haven't tried it yet but looks interesting. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpECyhSA7g0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpECyhSA7g0</a>
We specifically don't let you play non-Soundcloud music for this exact reason. It can get us in just as much hot water to let you broadcast copyrighted music via our servers to our players as it can for you to upload it to Soundcloud.
@Heilemann, I'm on a PC running Windows 8.1. I've already had challenges with various (usually non-desktop) apps getting muted when not visible, so I've avoided anything specific to this distribution. @John, thanks for the Google-Fu. I was polling the user base to find something that was easy to use, reliable, and well-tested before I started running software trials. Riley D. said: We specifically don't let you play non-Soundcloud music for this exact reason. It can get us in just as much hot water to let you broadcast copyrighted music via our servers to our players as it can for you to upload it to Soundcloud. In my ideal world the music could be uploaded as a GM resource for games, controlled by the GM, heard by members of the invited and attending members, and therefore not "publicly available." Put in other terms, the music would be treated in the same fashion as character portraits, maps, or other images that get uploaded. I can understand why you've decided to sidestep that particular legal battle though, much in the same fashion that you don't have any document repository to discourage pirated PDFs. Turn-of-the-20th century tongue-in-cheek Broadway numbers are a fairly niche market that Soundcloud doesn't appear to have tapped. I spent a couple hours trying various keywords and coming up largely empty for matches. For more generic fantasy, modern, or space campaigns they have content, but historical periods are another story. Given the option, I'd definitely use the built-in audio controls of Roll20.
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Gid
Roll20 Team
Price H. said: Turn-of-the-20th century tongue-in-cheek Broadway numbers are a fairly niche market that Soundcloud doesn't appear to have tapped. I spent a couple hours trying various keywords and coming up largely empty for matches. For more generic fantasy, modern, or space campaigns they have content, but historical periods are another story. Given the option, I'd definitely use the built-in audio controls of Roll20. While you won't have control over the content played, you might want to look into thematic radio stations like Radio Riel . Radio Riel have Steampunk, Ragtime and Dieselpunk themes stations as well as a couple really off-market variants that might work for the niche games you're trying to run.
Nice find - thanks Kristin! That will definitely work for background music, and it gives me a different kind of search to start on.