$12256 / $11500
I can't afford to host my own website right now. The advantage of me giving away music for free on OGA is that I can use this site as a portfolio. Since Soundcloud completely guts audio quality, this site is decent enough and will upload your track as is, without applying AI driven processing etc. to my knowledge. While there are a lot of people who upload work out of the kindness of their heart to help devs, some are trying to use this as a platform to boost their brand in addition to providing a service to game devs who may just be starting out or can't afford hiring a freelancer.
As a musician trying to do the social media hustle, it is impossible to get anyone to click on anything. So if it takes 2 clicks and it's an unfamiliar website (no offense, but no one has heard of OGA who isn't already a member) you are looking at an almost impossible endeavor to get strangers to click the link I posted, THEN click the play button. If it autoplayed it would get rid of some of that. My suggestion would be to turn on autoplay by default for people who don't have an account (aka most people who would be visiting from an external website) but have an option to uncheck it for members. I know this sounds trivial but it's not, people's attention span these days is about 4 seconds if they don't hear something they like. Getting people to care about your art in an environment where artists are so oversaturated is REALLY hard. With Twitter updating their Retweet policy so you have to click an additional time to access the retweeted content, it's even harder now.
I know this site is mainly focused on visual art but I'm just trying to figure out how it can be used to work for audio artists, who are at a RIDICULOUSLY bigger disadvantage compared to visual artists, since a piece of art can be seen by a viewer and judged whether it's good or not based on looking for 10 seconds, whereas music is temporal and people are usually looking for any reason to stop listening because they have things to do.
I've given a lot to this site over the years, though I admit I've been uploading less since I haven't gotten much attention from it. It would be nice if this site could give a little more back to its contributors. I'm not sure how the administrative side of things are going right now, but if there is any capacity to make this change I would be incredibly grateful.
End rant.
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Will look into it, but any form of auto play has been beyond difficult to implement since 2018. We have to fight active countermeasures in browsers just to get it to work.
--Medicine StormI see, thanks for reading anyway! Guess I'm back where I started unfortunately.
I'm still going to give it a shot. Let me know if you see something that looks like it might work. in the meantime, I'm guessing linking directly to the tracks is not sufficient? For example:
--Medicine StormWait, can you explain how you did that? I've been trying to just copy the link at the top of the page and post to Twitter. Whatever you did there, when I clicked it, it instantly played. If this is possible to link to Twitter just like this, it's exactly what I'm looking for!
Oh...
Yaay!
Once you submit a song, the preview is given a static url. Click the edit tab on your submission, right click the preview file name, and select 'copy link address'. (Menu text may vary depending on browser)
Note that the instant play feature of direct linking may not work for all users. Some people have their browser preferences set to stop auto play for these as well. Hope it's still helpful to you. :)
--Medicine StormThanks Andrea! It isn't totally ideal with Twitter formatting, but at least isn't a Soundcloud link, which people ignore like the plague :P:P. Definitely a bit of a workaround but it also helps solve another problem! I rarely used a different .MP3 file for previews because I didn't see a huge use for it, but now I can edit down a preview so it starts on the most interesting part (skipping past the boring preamble stuff that turns most people off) and just link to that and let it autoplay.
I just did some reading and it sounds like on Chrome for Desktop, Google removed the disable autoplay setting, although it is still available on the Android version. So at least if people are using Chrome, I can assault them with my sonic spells like we're on Myspace in 2007!
I know NOTHING about the backend management of the website or how hard to implement things are, but I think if this could be refined into a slightly more user friendly feature it could be really useful for musicians on the site.
Right now it's just a flat link when I try to Tweet, which isn't the worst, but the dream scenario would be for it to format with a card or something that could pull metadata from the page and get the song name and artist name in a little bubble that is nicely formatted within the tweet, similar to how linking a Youtube video does. I'm guessing that has more to do with Twitter's handling of the stuff and not so much the external content that's being linked but...maybe not? I really don't want to be that jerk who is flippantly asking for something that is an insane technical challenge or something, but is something like that a possibility?
It may be a possibility, but a lot of users don't like that sort of thing, so there would have to be some pretty heavy opt-out features. Or, more likely, auto-play that only works with a very specific link variable, like futureversionofopengameart.org/content/black-diamond?auto-play=true. Though even that is subject to abuse by spammers, so we would have to restrict it to working on submissions by users who have been approved or something. I have no doubt you would be approved for this since you're an obviously upstanding user. The reason I bring it up is because it adds complexity to the feature. The site had some recent hiccups when we enabled some modules for this kind of new feature. It's unfortunately a sensitive back-end that is prone to emotional breakdowns. One small change that should have improved how audio submissions are previewed resulted in audio previews not working at all unless you viewed them from the gallery.
TL;DR: Possible, but it may need to wait until we're migrated to OGA3... which doesn't have a lot of volunteers at the moment. :/
--Medicine Storm