Since audio in Scratch is no longer automatically compressed, the space each one takes can be infuriating at times.

My reasons for proposing this suggestion go towards increasing the quality of audio, without sacrificing the space required to store it in the project itself.

EXAMPLE URL
Bossfight - Starship Showdown (Youtube link).
The URL could be a youtube video or a webpage containing a single file/element in the HTML body.

SAVING
When a project page is loaded, the audios are downloaded, and then cached but not saved in the project itself ; this will be done to prevent any significant delay before playing a song.

IMPLEMENTATION
Now, the way this would be implemented doesn't seem too tasking either, instead of uploading the audio file, you would enter the URL to the file in the editor, the audio would then be cached and not save the music itself when you exit.

Another implementation is to add a way to support YouTube links by default as well.
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Examples of projects that would require significantly more space to save to Scratch/space:
https://beefchips.github.io/beefchips/#306911665 (ScratchBeats! RB)
Geometry Dash Emulator

Thoughts?

Bump, although will probably prove to be futile.

Boop.

Bump. I don't know why in particular, but the already rejected suggestion threads seem to gain more traction.

Semi-support.
While this can be infinitely helpful for people who use audio and such, the ST cannot guarantee that a Scratcher won't end up adding inappropriate music to their project(s).

If I understand the Scratch project storage system correctly, audio is not stored in the project itself. On the Scratch server, things are saved a little differently than on your computer. Instead of having a bunch of project.sb3 files, it stores the project.json files separate from the audio and picture files.

The project.json file for each project stores the md5 asset IDs(file names) for the audio and pictures it uses. When you load a project, it goes through the list of assets and loads each one.

If you have two projects that have the exact same audio clip, they actually share the same file on the server. How else do you think the Scratch Team is supposed to keep Scratch Cat from taking up gigabytes of space?

The ability to load audio from YouTube videos or elsewhere on the internet would be difficult to moderate. This would be especially difficult with user created websites where they can change the audio at any time. It might be perfectly fine audio when shared, but what about a year later?

While YouTube videos are less prone to changing, how is Scratch supposed to download the video and get the audio from it? Difficulty to implement aside, It's probably against YouTube's terms of service to do something like that.

imfh wrote:

-snip-
While YouTube videos are less prone to changing, how is Scratch supposed to download the video and get the audio from it? Difficulty to implement aside, It's probably against YouTube's terms of service to do something like that.

Good question! I suspect since one of Google's branches helps to fund Scratch, it may be in the realm of possibilities that they can acquire permission to do such?

EDIT: Wait, if similar assets share the same source, what if we could just use those sources to reuse in a project with virtually nonexistant data cost? =o

ChiaJia wrote:

Semi-support.
While this can be infinitely helpful for people who use audio and such, the ST cannot guarantee that a Scratcher won't end up adding inappropriate music to their project(s).

I can see this being more a problem for using non-YouTube sites. Anyhow, It feels to be seemingly as easy to upload audio that breaks the rules without using YouTube; imfh however, brings up one of the problems in my suggestion (in the quote above).

So, as of currently, I see a URL not hosted on YouTube to bring up problems. (How editing audio will play out also seems debatable).


EDIT: By conserving space, I was referring to the 25 MB limit placed on saving projects (it limits to 25MB- for me), not specifically the Scratch server itself; the suggestion is meant to ease how much data is spent on filling the project with music that should just be hosted elsewhere.

I think it would be cool to be able to play audio from base64 strings anyways

I mean you can download a yt vid (music) as mp3 then
put it in your project

Project filesize has no limit, it’s project.json that does and sounds are not included as a part of project.json so they aren’t limited

You would have to configure a web request yourself that is Cors compliment if you wanna do this too

cookieclickerer33 wrote:

Project filesize has no limit, it’s project.json that does and sounds are not included as a part of project.json so they aren’t limited

they probably meant the asset limit

gdfsgdfsgdfg wrote:

cookieclickerer33 wrote:

Project filesize has no limit, it’s project.json that does and sounds are not included as a part of project.json so they aren’t limited

they probably meant the asset limit

As far as I can tell assets aren’t limited, if they are they have a very high limit that I’ve never run in to

cookieclickerer33 wrote:

As far as I can tell assets aren’t limited, if they are they have a very high limit that I’ve never run in to

I meant the asset file size limit

yeah, but someone would probably use a youtuber that swears very often.

TheEpikGamer211 wrote:

yeah, but someone would probably use a youtuber that swears very often.

Report le project then. Anyone could easily upload a project with audio exported from an innapropriate video
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Support, this would be really helpful, especially since most people export music that could be from online already

There should be a credit system as well so make sure that the source used is credited