Improving Audio, Storage, and Performance

So, I'd answer the incredibly educated individual that responded to me by citing "cheapness", but it seems that they had their post deleted for being inflammatory, so that's something - that being the case, I'll simply make a general statement to any remaining users that are jumping onto the "You're entitled!" bandwagon. Stop that. What you are doing is legitimately bad for both sides - now why would that be? Well, you're making the argument that people should not ask, request, or complain about anything when a company changes something. You're stating "You don't pay! You're just dead weight to the site.". This is, infact,, first of all, incredibly wrong. Someone has stated this already, but free players contribute to the site in two ways - one, simple ad revenue, which is something that you have to deal with everytime you open a game window, and two - and I think more importantly, spreading the service. Have I bought a subscription? No, never. And I don't intend to, if I'm honest. However, with me constantly running games and using the service, I have infact gotten people that played with me to buy the subscriptions for their own games, since the usage of the service itself became ingrained into our gaming habits. Sitting there and screaming "YOU CAN'T ASK FOR ANYTHING!" to a consumer is the worst thing you could possibly do, as you are literally saying that a consumer should never complain about anything - which sets up a horrible precedent for anything. If a F2P game goes Pay-to-win? You can't complain. You haven't paid anything. The developers are right to do what they want. If roll20 nixes more features? You can't complain. You haven't paid anything. The more you defend this perception, the more you are literally giving the green light for any service to exploit it's users - and it wouldn't stop just by free - everything works in layers, because you are all absoluetly right when you said roll20 and other services need to make money - but the more you present your backsides to it, the more it'll be able to do to make money - and I'm not saying this to demonize roll20 or anything. They're positively right in wanting to make as much money as  they can - it's a business. But when it's users simply let it do whatever and scream at other users for stating "I kind of don't like this", you are giving it further leeway to do it as it pleases. Ultimately, costumers have absolutely every right to complain about exactly what they want - that's not being a entitled child. That's called caring for the service they're using. Stop presenting your arguments with this strawman of "You're just a cheap baby!" - that's not how those things work. If a particular complaint truly is unreasonable and idiotic, it'll lose traction. Amusingly enough, this isn't.

For all free users, and i guess there's maybe other better options out there, but here's what me and my friends do when we game (because a few of us had technical issues with music in R20), we either use a place called PlugDJ; It's not perfect, some people have technical issues with it too, but if you want music as background for your campaign, you can give that a try; or we use a music bot in our discord. Hope this helps.

i just started on roll20 a couple weeks ago. now i created my first campaing. i enjoyed fanburst because i discovered i could implement wolf and ghost soundeffects to make things more immersive and spooky for the players. i dont see a real free alternative to do so after it shuts down. playing ambient Music outside of roll20 doesnt fix that. i guess ill find a solution somehow. but its kinda sad to see the poppup of fanburst being killed one day after i found out about it and liked it. 

Personally, I think the focus shouldn't be on what has been taken away. I don't think anybody here argues that roll20 chose to no longer offer fanburst. What people are most up in arms about is the fact that they have to spread their free storage space across more items due to this alternative way to access audio that roll20 offers now in addition to incompetec, battlebards and tabletopaudio. But let's do some back of the envelope math here. I can run a free campaign with 10 maps of the highest possible size allowed on a free account, 5 MB, add in 10 tracks of custom music to pad out the already excellent offerings from the other services, at 26 MB according the dev posting earlier, and still have over 20 MB free for custom tokens, portraits and doodads. Seems to me you can still run a pretty awesome campaign on a free account. And since accounts are free, there is not much reason to run more than one per account.

Rage B. said: Riddle me this, people who paid. Why won't you switch tabs to youtube? Or set up a bot on discord? as someone who has had a pro subscription for quite awhile and had to stop because of financial issues i will say that i always used a bot on discord for music. the jukebox on roll20 was only ever for the occasional sound effects. as a DM you can do whatever you need. your players dont ussually see you alt-tab to discord to put in a bot command. and as many have said, music and sound effects are not something you need for a game at all. 

And that is why Roll20 is turning to shit.

Because i PAID for a kickstarter that got absorbed into roll20 - i have a 'backer' account - and while we get a couple of extras (no ads and dynamic lighting) we still only get 100MB of storage space - so I too would like to see the storage space increased.

I don’t use sounds, I have my hands full with running the game as is. Especially with how slow AFoW became for everyone after the “optimization”. I cannot run my games on my iPad Pro 12,9”, I have to dust off my wife’s old notebook once a week to DM.  We pay for subscription and WoTC D&D campaigns but we have D&D Beyond as well. Us, subscribers, who are paying customers have many legitimate problems on roll20 we can criticize. But  on the other hand,  Free users, If you don’t like a service, don’t use it. If you didn’t pay for it, why be so entitled? You know guys. There is a thing called Discord and theatre-of-the-mind.   I am tempted many times to just gather the party and leave, since almost none of the paid features we use here work as intended.

Sad to see about 90% of my audio go, but I'm looking forward to being able to upload my own audio. Glad to see Roll20 at work! Hoping for more great updates like this in the future.

It is easier (if you are paid) to include scripted elements to prompt for sound effects when a trap is triggered or specific macro is run.

Matthew M. said: As for actual math?  I dont know the current numbers, but I do remember in 2017 when they talked about hitting 2million users.  i wonder how many of them are active?  because thats important too.   But lets say its 2 million.  Its likely more.  Lets talk about 50 meg raise for 2 million users.  (where it would be rare if its anything greater than 15% active users),   Thats 50 terabytes. (again, id bet that number is likely bigger, as thats over a year old) For users that mostly dont use it, according to roll20.  Increasing that amount of storage would be ridiculously expensive, and it would either mean more capital investment or the costs would have to go to the advertisement, or pro users.   And honestly, to a certain degree, thats what many pro users might be thinking.   Now i know we all have computers with terabytes, and we're thinking, "gee thats only about 15 Grand, maybe?".  But on servers?  with indexing the data?   That can be indeed a software nightmare.  For something that honestly, probably isnt needed. The two caveats I'm seeing is 1) When it was mentioned here that not all users are using much of their 100 mb storage as is, and 2) that F2P users are here entirely parasitic. With caveat 1, the thing that comes to mind is... How much is actually used and expended as a consequent result, if they're only using 15-20% of said data? 15 grand a month doesn't sound like a minor expenditure, no, but then again... The second caveat kicks in as it pertains is to ad revenue. Some of this was furthered by marketplace purchases, and formerly patreon deals, both of whom are still essentially shafted. Don't know how much ad revenue is driven, but I'm sure it's providing at least some offset at worst. I imagine your proposition of having F2P's request data increases individually might be a pain to micromanage though, but I think the staff is more fit to answer that idea than me. Another idea is to give some extra buffer to former subscribers or those who made marketplace purchases. it'd also be pretty sweet if uploaded music could be freely searched and shared though - which would be a godsend in preventing uploads. I imagine the bandwidth would be hell though, haha, so that might be ruled out.

I'm gonna be the really new...but really old guy at the same time. Yeah, I'm a free user of Roll20. Before Roll20, I used OpenRPG and Traipse, and before those, it was ICQ and AIM for RP. I also have some mild coding experience and walked myself through stuff like rollable tables. So, take what I say as someone who is used to doing things the hard way, and doesn't really change. As a free user, most of this doesn't affect me. I don't host my sheets on third-party websites, because when they go(and eventually they ALL go) your sheet, your work goes with them. The same is true of songs or image clips. Anything I put up onto Roll20 is either a linked image, or from my hard drive. So I'm not hitting my head against the ceiling on the 100mb cap. However, this doesn't really do anything to persuade me to subscribe either. A lot of this seems to be for hyper-users of Roll20, that are maximizing every feature available, and that's usually the people who are mid or top-tier subscribers. Which is fine. But I'm still using VoiceAttack, to code key macros that will let me press one button and run a macro, over typing out any shortened command or using the way too fiddley macro toolbar. I'm trying to tweak macros to display rolls and results in a way I want them to. And nothing here, fixes any of that or makes my work easier. So I'm not jazzed about these changes, but neither am I despondent. This is just more Roll20. Not good, not bad, just more.

Garreth M. said: But let's do some back of the envelope math here. I can run a free campaign with 10 maps of the highest possible size allowed on a free account, 5 MB, add in 10 tracks of custom music to pad out the already excellent offerings from the other services, at 26 MB according the dev posting earlier, and still have over 20 MB free for custom tokens, portraits and doodads. Seems to me you can still run a pretty awesome campaign on a free account. And since accounts are free, there is not much reason to run more than one per account. Ten maps. Ten. I mean not to be dismissive except I totally am dismissing this, but ten maps? Come on. I mean for a short campaign, sure. You're mostly right, though, when you raise the free account stuff. A solution could be to just make multiple accounts and make them all the DM. That's...probably against the rules in some way? I'm not totally sure, it's been a while since I read them.

Annamelech said: Garreth M. said: But let's do some back of the envelope math here. I can run a free campaign with 10 maps of the highest possible size allowed on a free account, 5 MB, add in 10 tracks of custom music to pad out the already excellent offerings from the other services, at 26 MB according the dev posting earlier, and still have over 20 MB free for custom tokens, portraits and doodads. Seems to me you can still run a pretty awesome campaign on a free account. And since accounts are free, there is not much reason to run more than one per account. Ten maps. Ten. I mean not to be dismissive except I totally am dismissing this, but ten maps? Come on. I mean for a short campaign, sure. You're mostly right, though, when you raise the free account stuff. A solution could be to just make multiple accounts and make them all the DM. That's...probably against the rules in some way? I'm not totally sure, it's been a while since I read them. I agree. I cannot imagine how you can make an actual campaign with just ten maps.

Pro Subscriber here. I'm not happy about losing Fanburst. I don't need music, but I did like having the ability to quickly look up a random sound effect, creaking doors, sounds of crying etc. Stuff I may or may not use again, and am NOT going to spend time looking up and uploading on my own.

I'm confused as to why there is an upload cap of 20mb on the sound files you can upload if there already is a cap on the total amount of mb you can upload.  I have big audio files that I use as ambient music and this is severely going to hinder the game experience.

Not sure if it was asked. Will others uploads be searchable?  I mean in as far as like fanbust, I can browse and search for a sound I need for a one off sound. Verses going to find a sound like I want elsewhere, upload it, and use it, then delete from my library.  I'd wager 3/4 of my sounds I use a handful of times for a certain setting that I found on fanburst by a keyword search. If not sadly my games will be eerily silent as adding time to search google for sounds I need, add them, and remove them next week on top of GM prep will mean I probably wont be adding that work to my weekly prep :( Add to this it being searchable more than likely would save Roll20 quite a bit of space, as some staple sounds many many of us would have duplicate uploads of the same music/sounds/ect spread across a LOT of GMs I'm certain. (I still think the freesound.org API would be a great replacement for fanburst, and they are not going anywhere)

VP said: If you're a free user you can also utilize other options such as creating playlists on YouTube. Not ideal but a functional alternative. This is what I usually do anyway, as some want music for the game and others do not.

I agree with a lot of people that free accounts should have their storage increased as well. Also, I'm sad about fan burst as I had mostly good experience with it and while I commend the roll20 team for a quick implementation of the alternative, I do not think that My Audio is the perfect solution just yet. It will take a lot of time to upload your own audio and of fanburst you had access to all sounds uploaded by many others. I guess there is no easy solution, but this will still affect my campaigns for the worse. 

DXWarlock said: Not sure if it was asked. Will others uploads be searchable?  I mean in as far as like fanbust, I can browse and search for a sound I need for a one off sound. Verses going to find a sound like I want elsewhere, upload it, and use it, then delete from my library.  Hi DXWarlock, It is my understanding that there is no searching across users, and that your music library will be similar to your art library. Roll20 mentioned this in earlier announcements, if not here. They did a lot of research to make sure they were on firm legal footing (which is why there is a listener cap within a single game). I believe this was also one of the compromises. Otherwise they would essentially become a music sharing site, with the attendant legal hurdles and license problems that entails.

Icefox said: Entropomancer said: It's not, it's a net loss, thus the reason they didnt do it. Many dont seem to understand the expenditure associated with it. Some have suggested a one time purchase to expand their storage and it is viable as many MMO's use a similar bargain. Buy some official content, say 5 dollars worth or more and it unlocks extra character slots, bonus items, etc. In roll20's case it could simply be a data storage rider. Buy a product from the marketplace for 5.99 or more and receive 50mb storage as a bonus. If you are correct and estimates of how many more customers they could get in the future with a bit of extra space are accurate, then this could be an alternative. And I'm willing to concede that MAY be accurate. Though not in my personal experience, because I know a lot of people who have been turned off by this and who might stop using the service entirely - two of whom were actually planning to sub once their financial positions got better, but are doubtful now and beginning to look into other services. My experiences there bias me, and maybe make my appraisal unrealistic? Unsure! Anyway that idea has merit. I'd say that is at MINIMUM what they should do, if there is a serious feeling by the big wigs that what we're advocating for isn't financially superior. Rey said: Free users should not be complaining, its free. Everyone should get a subscription of some type to help Roll20 become even better. Unfortunately life isn't that simple. Some people just can't afford it, but could later. And some people are just cheap - but can be convinced to be far less cheap if they feel well-treated . I believe these aren't being considered enough in this decision. I mean, they increased the benefits for subscribing without increasing the price... So... Vesimus  said: I am rich by no means but I will reasonably pay for something I have value in.  I run a campaign session once a month that lasts 4-6 hours and It blows my mind to see the reactions some people are having about this. Paypal offers an option called "Money Pools", I've created one called "Campaign Support" that I've posted in the forum section of my campaign which my players can donate to.  Others could similarly use this crowd funding model to pay a dollar each month and solve many of the gripes that people are complaining about.  Countless people have offered several solutions yet push back is all that's received. If you cant see beyond self entitlement at least confront problems with solutions, and try to be adult about it.  If your not happy with roll20 then by all means, explore other options. I've tried many, and my wallet will gladly pay its due.  It not only pays my due, but it pays for those who don't as well, because if no one paid there would be no roll20. This. 100%

For folks looking to find the original tracks on Fanburst, hover over the name in your jukebox and a cloud icon will appear. Click on that and you will open a browser tab to where the file is hosted. I don't know how many of them are downloadable.

Devily said: Annamelech said: Garreth M. said: But let's do some back of the envelope math here. I can run a free campaign with 10 maps of the highest possible size allowed on a free account, 5 MB, add in 10 tracks of custom music to pad out the already excellent offerings from the other services, at 26 MB according the dev posting earlier, and still have over 20 MB free for custom tokens, portraits and doodads. Seems to me you can still run a pretty awesome campaign on a free account. And since accounts are free, there is not much reason to run more than one per account. Ten maps. Ten. I mean not to be dismissive except I totally am dismissing this, but ten maps? Come on. I mean for a short campaign, sure. You're mostly right, though, when you raise the free account stuff. A solution could be to just make multiple accounts and make them all the DM. That's...probably against the rules in some way? I'm not totally sure, it's been a while since I read them. I agree. I cannot imagine how you can make an actual campaign with just ten maps. I am not suggesting you run a campaign with just 10 maps. Even though that is totally possible for a shorter campaign. I'm saying you should easily be able to run most campaigns using only 10 maps at any given time. And keep in mind I'm only talking about maps that involve unique max size images. You can of course have many more smaller maps or maps that use freely accessible assets or maps that re-use images you uploaded. And none of this should be a new story. Free players were limited in how many maps they could have full of different assets before. The only thing that's changed is the number of maps they can have, which has decreased, but is still completely usable.

Aniond said: How are you getting screwed?  You're not paying into it.   You're just using a free service.  You get what you didn't pay for. Statement of the day.

I want to thank the roll20 team for rolling this out as quickly as they have in response to the Fanburst closing. My game ran the other night and much to my dismay I found out about the closing and looked at all my music tracks that have helped to give the campaign the feel it has. I was worried I was going to have to find a new way to do things.. But with the roll out of this new feature I'm excited I can use my own library of music as I have been when playing in person for years ^_^ A job well done getting this out before the closure. The song of my games shall never be silenced!

keithcurtis said: DXWarlock said: Not sure if it was asked. Will others uploads be searchable?  I mean in as far as like fanbust, I can browse and search for a sound I need for a one off sound. Verses going to find a sound like I want elsewhere, upload it, and use it, then delete from my library.  Hi DXWarlock, It is my understanding that there is no searching across users, and that your music library will be similar to your art library. Roll20 mentioned this in earlier announcements, if not here. They did a lot of research to make sure they were on firm legal footing (which is why there is a listener cap within a single game). I believe this was also one of the compromises. Otherwise they would essentially become a music sharing site, with the attendant legal hurdles and license problems that entails. Ah good point, sad to hear it, but it does make sense that's the way its going to be from a legal standpoint. Main reason I used the music/sound is I could find almost an endless supply of quick sounds that fit to what I needed. Looks like my players are going to get use to hearing the same 60ish songs and sounds a LOT..lol

Making this a rich vs. poor argument is missing the point.  Yeah, it's class warfare but it's players vs. GMs because Roll20 puts all the incentive to subscribe on GM features.  The only reason to subscribe as a player is to get rid of ads.  As a player, none of the benefits of a paid subscription affect games you play in but didn't create.  Roll20 needs to find ways to incentivize more players to subscribe.  Then perhaps they can be more generous in their free offerings.  Allowing them to contribute part of their storage quota to other users as suggested in this thread is one possible way.  Gift subscriptions are less than ideal given the tendency of games to collapse. But on the subject of advertising revenue, don't kid yourself that any ads you see are paying for your free account here.  Before I subscribed, ~60% of the ads were just Roll20 self advertisement filler.  ~30% was for marketplace items and the remainder was an ad for something off-site.  This is a very niche market audience.  Demand to advertise to it is fairly low.  I suspect ad revenue comes in a distant third to marketplace content sales and subscriptions 

The amount of elitism stemming from people being annoyed over other people having genuine inconveniences is staggering.

keithcurtis said: For folks looking to find the original tracks on Fanburst, hover over the name in your jukebox and a cloud icon will appear. Click on that and you will open a browser tab to where the file is hosted. I don't know how many of them are downloadable. Too few, I'm sorry to say. :/

Sponsorship deals do not necessarily pertain just to visible ads. Do not discount having even a fourth of 2 million potential customers who may want to purchase your rulebooks and supplements online. You don't even need to advertise for it, you just need to make sure the platform they use to easily find games keeps running; and maybe put your brand name high up in the stores and promotional lists. Not every marketing strategy is as blatant as advertisements, especially in a medium where adblock is a thing. Reducing it to ad revenue when it's likely a minimal factor is an oversimplification. What matters in any intelligent sponsorship deal is the total active user count. That determines the money flowing in. Not clicks on ads, not exposure to ads, but how many potential customers can be exposed to the product, and thus feel incentivized to purchase the entertainment you are selling. Ofc, this is entirely speculation on my part, because I have no way of knowing the minutiae of such agreements, but I trust in good business sense in combination with a good legal department to make things profitable. In this theoretical budget, incidentally, the 4.99 from subscribers is a bonus, not the onus to keep things running. A valued contribution, certainly, but, you need something more stable than subscription fees on a sporadic basis to cover your basic operational budget.

This has absolutely nothing to do with elitism.  This is basic business.  There won't be a Roll20 if they can't make money.  And what so many seem to be conveniently ignoring is that disk drives cost money.  So times of being able to GM, play and have all the music you want for free are over.  That isn't a fault of Roll20.  That's the fault of Fanburst.  For those that think that Roll20 can simply hook up to an alternative providing same free functionality as Fanburst?  What is there and is it legal?  Soundcloud?  Rumors have that going out of business as they've been losing money hand over fist.  

In reading some of these other posts, one time increase charges for storage, etc?  Makes sense.  Roll20 isn't setup for that right now, so isn't going to happen in the near term as that requires significant changes to a lot of Roll20.  Tailored storage per user?  OMG, that would take some time to implement.  May happen, but with the sudden shutdown of Fanburst, can't happen right now.  

If I may add to the conversation of "use Discord bot" thing, free users who used multiple layers of sound (Background music, several layers of ambient noise, maybe an spontaneous sound effect triggered by a certain player's action) are indeed screwed. Also, no matter what is said, not offering a compromise to the vast majority of the service's userbase (free users) when one of your website's core features, even if it was not their fault as the API they used blew up, does make for a bad customer satisfaction experience. You have something for free and that is taken for granted by everyone, and then it goes away and their given solution is to ask for money, no matter how you put it, is bad. Being understanding of a certain situation is different than being accepting of it. I do understand why they're doing it, I just heavily disagree with their practice. The vast majority of the website's users are Free accounts, they make the bulk of the users and they're the reason the website's a market leader and they probably could have worded it better to make the outrage easier, and possibly given a pint of a compromise to Free users. I speak this from a customer's POV and not necessarily the business perspective. Giving out more free space for the Free Accounts would surely elevate operation costs and could make the Free User business model unsustainable, or cut the profits margins to dangerously low levels. And while we don't have the insider's knowledge of why and how they came to their decision on this, it is part of the customer-business relationship of having this tug of war of customers asking for more buck for their money (in our case, the core of Free users) and the business trying to milk more money from us (luring us into paying for their service). 

  Kbludoh said: Also, no matter what is said, not offering a compromise to the vast majority of the service's userbase (free users) when one of your website's core features, even if it was not their fault as the API they used blew up, does make for a bad customer satisfaction experience. You have something for free and that is taken for granted by everyone, and then it goes away and their given solution is to ask for money, no matter how you put it, is bad. I have to say I totally disagree with this.  Fanburst chose to shut down.  Fanburst provided the free music, not Roll20.  Is there a free alternative that's legal?  I haven't read through all posts in this thread, but I haven't seen one yet.  Fantasy Grounds suggests Discord, etc..  They don't provide free music, never have.  Free music was complimentary provided by Roll20's relationship with Fanburst, but Fanburst is gone.  So, Roll20 should become another Fanburst although they've been legally advised not to?   This isn't about customer relationship at all.  This is 100% about Fanburst choosing to suddenly go out of business when they promised they wouldn't.  There's little alternative.  For people who are expecting free music, with no extra costs to host that free music, that's not customer relationship, that's completely unrealistic expectations.  

To be clear, Fanburst was one of 4 music and sound providers available in the Roll20 jukebox.  The other three are still up and running and providing audio.  Fanburst just had the best selection.  It's not as though the jukebox became completely useless without Fanburst.

Tom said: This is a good solution. I'm sure Roll20 was/is expensive to develop and maintain. Storage space isn't cheap. I just don't get the entitlement of people claiming they deserve 3 GBs (or whatever) of space as a FREE user. No one has ever demanded 3 gigs. Hell, someone suggested just an additional 500 MBs EDIT: "Increased upload limit for all users (20 MB) for audio files." Well, that's good for me.

keithcurtis said: I would like to remind people to remain civil, by the CoC you all agreed to when you joined the forums. "Be excellent to each other." Well said. So you're upset that you might have to pay $5/month for your hobby. You can be upset. Just stop trashing the site and everyone else. 

some people sneed to save their money offering the same service that has been offered from the time i signed up here shouldn't be too hard.

CUDA said: some people sneed to save their money offering the same service that has been offered from the time i signed up here shouldn't be too hard. Based.

Psyga S.  said: Tom  said: This is a good solution. I'm sure Roll20 was/is expensive to develop and maintain. Storage space isn't cheap. I just don't get the entitlement of people claiming they deserve 3 GBs (or whatever) of space as a FREE user. No one has ever demanded 3 gigs. Hell, someone suggested just an additional 500 MBs EDIT: "Increased upload limit for all users (20 MB) for audio files." Well, that's good for me. Again, unrealistic for people to believe that Roll20 should become the next Fanburst and start hosting music for free.  That was the core business of  Fanburst and has never been the core business of Roll20. Only a 500mb increase for free?  Say there's 300,000 GMs under free subscribers.  That's 150,000 GB or 150 Terabyte increase in storage.  I know nothing about Roll20 infrastructure, but that's no small amount especially if they've gone solid state.  But, there's also server costs to hold the music and load balancing servers in front of them to maintain performance, plus increased bandwidth requirements to support both play and upload.  Include backup and recovery in the event of server failure and maintenance costs for the additional servers, and the cost for a "minor" 500MB increase per person is enormous.  I believe 300,000 free subscriber GMs is very much on the low side.   

Victor B. said:   Kbludoh said: Also, no matter what is said, not offering a compromise to the vast majority of the service's userbase (free users) when one of your website's core features, even if it was not their fault as the API they used blew up, does make for a bad customer satisfaction experience. You have something for free and that is taken for granted by everyone, and then it goes away and their given solution is to ask for money, no matter how you put it, is bad. I have to say I totally disagree with this.  Fanburst chose to shut down.  Fanburst provided the free music, not Roll20.  Is there a free alternative that's legal?  I haven't read through all posts in this thread, but I haven't seen one yet.  Fantasy Grounds suggests Discord, etc..  They don't provide free music, never have.  Free music was complimentary provided by Roll20's relationship with Fanburst, but Fanburst is gone.  So, Roll20 should become another Fanburst although they've been legally advised not to?   This isn't about customer relationship at all.  This is 100% about Fanburst choosing to suddenly go out of business when they promised they wouldn't.  There's little alternative.  For people who are expecting free music, with no extra costs to host that free music, that's not customer relationship, that's completely unrealistic expectations.   It is about customer relationship in a sense, because they've been thrust into that position by Fanburst. Yes, it was not roll20's service to provide free music, and honestly they shouldn't become a new Fanburst: it's not even a matter of being inadvisable legal-wise, it is a matter of being unrealistic business-wise. The outrage, which in my point of view is valid, is how they handled the situation by simply not providing any sort of "compensation" for Free users like they did with extra storage space for Plus and Pro users. Just as a complement, if Psyga S.'s comment on 20mb extra for audio files for Free Users is indeed correct, that's at the very least a step in the right direction. I'm not complaining about free music, I'm complaining about the loss of a custom music player in roll20 that was there for free without a satisfactory compensation. Yes, it was handled by Fanburst, but API or not, different company or not, it was indeed a feature in roll20 that, regardless what is said, was part of roll20's services. Just think like that: Like anything in life, if it was for free before and now it's suddenly paid, you'd be outraged. That's how, all in all, Free users feel.

Hashiru said: the 100 MB for free users was tolerable before music uploads now it's impossible to run a dam game, it'd be nice if we could get a space upgrade too... not everyone in the world has money to spend on a site where their there to just have fun. Impossible?  That's overstating things a smidge.  At most, this is inconvenient.  Worst case scenario is that your game lacks music.  Or you have to pipe audio through another free service like Discord.  Lacking things like Advanced Fog of War and full access to the API is far more limiting. Me, I'm one of those cheapskate free users who takes advantage of the fact that Roll20 is bringing in money from the subscribers.  I'm grateful for what I get.

Psyga S. said: EDIT: "Increased upload limit for all users (20 MB) for audio files." Well, that's good for me. Not to fan the flames any more, but I also feel that misinformation is harmful. This is an increase in the file size limit that is allowed to upload to Roll20. Specifically, audio files up to 20 MB in size can be uploaded (the previous size was 10 MB). It does not increase storage space.

I'm going to have to side with the Free users here, and say all the other paid users and Roll20 are being ridiculous. In this day and age, and what we have storage wise and how much it costs, the old 100/1/2 storage size was ridiculously terribly bad. In no way should it have been that low. And even with this update they still fell short. 100/3/6? Really? In this day and age you should be able to at least manage 1/5/10. At the very least 500 for free users, minimum. I can't help but imagine these sort of decisions are being made by Nolan, who has shown he shouldn't be in charge of anything by his previous actions such as on Reddit. This update storage wise was a half measure that still doesn't give paid users what should be standard these days, and screwed over Free users.

Something I noticed: I was at 93 mb/100 mb storage without even realizing it, and a lot of it from completed campaigns I never intended to use again. I suspect a great many free users may have issues even finding their uploads and managing them. It would likely be beneficial to everyone (!) if the management of image and sound uploads were an easily found and accessible feature. Call it a QoL and UI issue that might help people manage what they have considerably better and benefit everyone, host included, because people being aware that the data from deleted/finished campaigns is still being stored (I wasn't, until I actually went and checked), thus, able to manage said data means less data sitting around that's simply not being used or never will be used again.

I do understand.  But compensation implies payment, of which free users do not.  And since Roll20 is now being forced to make music part of it's core business, it can't afford to do it for free.  You never know, after the dust settles they may bump up free storage, but I have a feeling that will be after they've had time to determine overall costs of this change with paying users.  Have they had time to determine overall impact of this on their current infrastructure?  Do they even know right now if $5/month or $10/month subscriptions will cover the costs or reduce their income to the point where they have to reduce staff?  No clue.  It was what?  A week or two ago that Fanburst announced it's closing?  That's hardly time to effectively plan for anything.   So at this point, business has to take over and they need to at least cover their costs, which means paying subscriptions.  Over time, who knows?  You might get what you want.  

Subscriptions are not the only way to generate income, and a large free user base is vital to keeping your position on top of the market. Never mind, ideally, you will convince people who don't subscribe to pay for things on a case by case basis, if they feel welcome, are having fun and positively incentivized. Good business would actually be to increase the storage amount, or, even better, since this is a community driven thing, allow users to allocate their free storage to their GM. "Free" GMs may make other purchases after all, if they feel valued. Another thing: If HD space and server load are really that much of an issue, a flat per user tally, while viable, isn't as optimal as letting gaming groups and micro-communities allocate space in the most optimal manner. In a healthy, fun environment, this might even lead to pro users sharing their space with their "free" friends, which I suspect those who pool money for one subscription would like to do, especially bearing in mind playing with your friends is a huge reason to use roll20 in the first place for quite a few people in gaming groups that, over the course of many years, are now geographically rather far apart.

Cardboard Time Machine said: Another thing: If HD space and server load are really that much of an issue, a flat per user tally, while viable, isn't as optimal as letting gaming groups and micro-communities allocate space in the most optimal manner. In a healthy, fun environment, this might even lead to pro users sharing their space with their "free" friends, which I suspect those who pool money for one subscription would like to do, especially bearing in mind playing with your friends is a huge reason to use roll20 in the first place for quite a few people in gaming groups that, over the course of many years, are now geographically rather far apart.  Remember, it's not just disk space, but servers, bandwidth, backups, etc., that are required.  Your idea of "sharing" space is a good one.  "One time" payments for increased storage, another good one.  I agree with a bump up of storage for free users.  I'm not suggesting your ideas are wrong by any means.   However, free users have to realize that this all happened 2 weeks ago and any changes like "sharing" or "one time" require significant code changes to enable.  Roll20 wasn't created with that concept and changes like that don't happen with a snap and across board increases of storage without fully knowing the business impact is suicide .     The blame here isn't on Roll20, but squarely upon Fanburst.  Free users will need to look outside of Roll20, which is what all other gaming sites do and give Roll20 time to figure out the future without Fanburst.  Again, you might eventually get what you want.  Depends on cost to Roll20 and they haven't had time to figure that out yet.   It's only been 2 weeks since Fanburst announcement.  

Oh definitely. My expectations for such things are entirely realistic. I don't expect immediate solutions and I'm more than aware we're likely to experience a series of hot fixes before a proper patch,because the entire situation came somewhat suddenly. Any kind of labour and production takes time, after all :) (Generally, my gist for this thread is that whether the user pays themselves or not, everyone is a customer, and ideally, simply by playing on the platform, you are providing roll20 with income. If this is not the case, it would be highly unfortunate and definitely something that needs to be addressed...by people that actually work for roll20. All I can do is make suggestions that may hopefully work well if they're implemented and possibly generate income somewhere down the line. Ideally.)