So me and a couple other Scratchers came up with a pretty cool idea: What if, on your profile, you could get a song to play? Not an inapropriate song, of course, and kids would be able to report, but it would be super cool if we could have a song put on our profile for others to listen to while they browse!!

No support, what's the point of this? And what if it's the middle of the night and everyone is sleeping and you decide to visit a profile, but suddenly music plays?

um why would u be on scratch in the middle of the night?

-ScratchingPost- wrote:

um why would u be on scratch in the middle of the night?

It's not the middle of the night for me — I live in India.

??? im not entirly sure what your point is. No matter what timezone, i dont think you should be on scratch in the midlle of the night.

There should be an option to mute the music for the people visiting the profile, but I support this idea!

-ScratchingPost- wrote:

??? im not entirly sure what your point is. No matter what timezone, i dont think you should be on scratch in the midlle of the night.

Oh, I thought you meant that I posted in the middle of the night. I misunderstood you.

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.
If you mean to choose one, also no support. Because…

Bedtime Math wrote:

So we don't know every song ever written. But a company called Gracenote keeps a list of all the songs out there: it had 79 million songs on it as of 2011. To get a sense of that number, 79 million minutes is about 150 years…so if most of the songs are from the year 1866 onward, that's 1 new song every minute.

Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

Support for this! It's a cool idea, as long as there is nothing inappropriate about the songs, everyone should be fine. Though there are probably gonna be a few complications for the Scratch Team, so they would need to add on to this. Still, I like how creative this idea was!

(By the way, I'm not new to Scratch, I'm an alt account that was just created yesterday)

-ScratchingPost- wrote:

kids would be able to report

Why just kids??
No support, this is just unnecessary, and wont help kids code.

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.
If you mean to choose one, also no support. Because…
Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

what about an AI that can identify bad words and those noises and ban them?

Reev0102 wrote:

No support, what's the point of this? And what if it's the middle of the night and everyone is sleeping and you decide to visit a profile, but suddenly music plays?

Then those kids should probably be using headphones - or, you know, sleeping. I'm sure anyone who's used the Web for half a minute knows that websites occasionally autoplay audio (more on the autoplaying thing later).

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.

It's actually really easy for a computer to detect not only the overall volume level of a sound, but also its perceived loudness - so if Scratch wanted to, they could add something that reduces the volume of any loud sounds. However, they don't seem to think it's enough of an issue to add something like that to the editor.

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

If that's the case, then we should also disable audio uploading in the Scratch editor to make sure nobody uploads a song with bad words in it.

My point is that it's not feasible to screen everything that's uploaded, and the Scratch Team has accepted that, so they invented Report buttons.

As for how I feel about the suggestion itself, I'm rather mixed. On one hand, this would be a very interesting and unique personalization feature that I haven't ever heard of being of any site other than MySpace, a social network that lived and died before some of the kids here on Scratch were even born, and long before any of them were using the Internet. It's a seemingly small change, but it would allow you to make your profile a lot more like yours, and less like a template with a few small boxes you can fill out.

But I also recognize that it has problems (although probably not the ones you're thinking of, I'll get to that): for one, some people don't mind autoplaying sounds when they go on a website, and others (like me) absolutely cannot stand it. (Come to think of it, Rickrolling is only possible because of autoplaying…) I'm not really sure if having it autoplay is a great idea - perhaps just a small embedded music player with a play button, a seek bar, and the name of the song would be a better solution.

However, there is one potentially big issue that I see with this - and it's everyone's favorite big dumb laws that always ruin everything, Copyright. The thing is, usually you are allowed to use external copyrighted material on Scratch without asking permission because your use of the copyrighted material likely falls under fair use. Generally, many uses of copyrighted works on Scratch are educational, nonprofit, can't act as a market replacement for the original, and most importantly, are transformative, meaning that it builds on the original for a different purpose.

There are exceptions where uses of copyrighted works on Scratch would not be fair use, and an example are “music sharing projects”, or projects that exist solely to share music and nothing else. These generally use the entire work, can act as an effective market replacement, and aren't transformative because they don't change it or add anything to it, meaning that these most likely aren't fair use - so the ST removes these projects immediately when they become aware of them. Unfortunately, I think the same thing would apply here - I can't really see how playing a song on your profile would count as fair use, unless you were playing a remix of the song that you made, or something like that…

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, here are a few of the arguments that I believe people are going to bring up against this suggestion - but I think they're non-issues:

• The loudness thing. I've already explained that this doesn't need to be an issue unless the Scratch Team allows it to be one.
  
• Inappropriate music - again, I can't see how this would be any more of an issue than the ST giving you free reign to upload any image or sound into the editor with no automatic screening. Basically, anywhere where you can submit something to Scratch, there is potential for abuse - and if we wanted to make sure that kids were never exposed to anything inappropriate at all, then Scratch probably wouldn't exist. In fact, in the Scratch Terms of Use that you agreed to when you signed up, section 4.5 states that you agree that despite the ST's rules, you may be exposed to some content you find objectionable.
  
• Storage space - not an issue in my eyes when the ST allows you to create an unlimited number of projects each potentially containing up to thousands of assets that can be up to 10 MB a piece. The space taken up by each user being allowed to upload one song would pale in comparison.
  

Overall, I think it might be a good idea if implemented well, but I'm not sure how feasible it is due to copyright.

EDIT: This is what I get for not reading the thread thoroughly enough, but someone above me brought up a really good point and now I don't know if I can really support this as much (Scratch is an educational coding website, so any feature that doesn't help towards that goal may not be the best use of resources):

7salad3salad wrote:

No support, this is just unnecessary, and wont help kids code.

Autofirejm wrote:

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.
If you mean to choose one, also no support. Because…
Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

what about an AI that can identify bad words and those noises and ban them?

Do you know how hard it is to make artificial intelligence?

I don't support this idea, in my oponion, its unecesarry

Autofirejm wrote:

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.
If you mean to choose one, also no support. Because…
Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

what about an AI that can identify bad words and those noises and ban them?

I mean, if you read what I quoted, every minute a song releases, I don't think the ST have time to upload them. If it's an AI, it has to listen to the full song and mute the bad words, songs are usually 3 minutes long.

-ScratchingPost- wrote:

So me and a couple other Scratchers came up with a pretty cool idea: What if, on your profile, you could get a song to play? Not an inapropriate song, of course, and kids would be able to report, but it would be super cool if we could have a song put on our profile for others to listen to while they browse!!

This is the best idea ever in my opinion :3
Scratch could do that update, if it can ruin the studios, it can also add music to our profiles like u said XD
Our profiles could be more aesthetic, creative and fun dont you guys think? Please, PLEEASE scratch, add music to our profiles!!
And wouldn't it be also cool if we could play a playlist with songs we choose from YT, and put in scratch so multiple songs could play? AND WE COULD MAKE OUR PROFILES MORE COLORFUL! Instead of white and blue we have on every profile, we could choose colors, I would make mine white and light purple

Flowermanvista wrote:

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.

It's actually really easy for a computer to detect not only the overall volume level of a sound but also its perceived loudness - so if Scratch wanted to, they could add something that reduces the volume of any loud sounds. However, they don't seem to think it's enough of an issue to add something like that to the editor.

Also, remember pitch. High-pitch audio can hurt one's ears badly.

Flowermanvista wrote:

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

If that's the case, then we should also disable audio uploading in the Scratch editor to make sure nobody uploads a song with bad words in it.

I don't get what you are saying here. Disable audio uploading? I was talking about if it is disabled and you need to choose audio, but where do these audio come from? By millions of lines of code and uploads of these songs that the ST needs to do. Read my original post.

Ivy_Zhangyanchu's OP wrote:

If you mean a feature that lets you upload sound files, then no support. Some kids can always upload an extremely loud buzzing sound that makes one's ear bleed.

This is two parts, don't mix them together.

If you mean to choose one, also no support. Because…

Bedtime Math wrote:

So we don't know every song ever written. But a company called Gracenote keeps a list of all the songs out there: it had 79 million songs on it as of 2011. To get a sense of that number, 79 million minutes is about 150 years…so if most of the songs are from the year 1866 onward, that's 1 new song every minute.

Do you think it's possible to let every ST member upload these songs, listen to them, and mute these bad words every minute?

BubblegumPop0204 wrote:

-ScratchingPost- wrote:

So me and a couple other Scratchers came up with a pretty cool idea: What if, on your profile, you could get a song to play? Not an inapropriate song, of course, and kids would be able to report, but it would be super cool if we could have a song put on our profile for others to listen to while they browse!!

This is the best idea ever in my opinion :3
Scratch could do that update, if it can ruin the studios, it can also add music to our profiles like u said XD
Our profiles could be more aesthetic, creative and fun dont you guys think? Please, PLEEASE scratch, add music to our profiles!!
And wouldn't it be also cool if we could play a playlist with songs we choose from YT, and put in scratch so multiple songs could play? AND WE COULD MAKE OUR PROFILES MORE COLORFUL! Instead of white and blue we have on every profile, we could choose colors, I would make mine white and light purple

scratch team will decide, idk

BubblegumPop0204 wrote:

-OP-

This is the best idea ever in my opinion :3
Scratch could do that update, if it can ruin the studios, it can also add music to our profiles like u said XD
Our profiles could be more aesthetic, creative and fun dont you guys think? Please, PLEEASE scratch, add music to our profiles!!
And wouldn't it be also cool if we could play a playlist with songs we choose from YT, and put in scratch so multiple songs could play? AND WE COULD MAKE OUR PROFILES MORE COLORFUL! Instead of white and blue we have on every profile, we could choose colors, I would make mine white and light purple

Please suggest by making a new topic instead of going to a random topic and start throwing your ideas.
And Scratch did not intend to ruin studios, there is a superhero called Google Extensions.
Last, the illustrations are already the most creative thing on Scratch. If all you want is just music, create a project and upload your amazing audio.

Ivy_Zhangyanchu wrote:

BubblegumPop0204 wrote:

-OP-

This is the best idea ever in my opinion :3
Scratch could do that update, if it can ruin the studios, it can also add music to our profiles like u said XD
Our profiles could be more aesthetic, creative and fun dont you guys think? Please, PLEEASE scratch, add music to our profiles!!
And wouldn't it be also cool if we could play a playlist with songs we choose from YT, and put in scratch so multiple songs could play? AND WE COULD MAKE OUR PROFILES MORE COLORFUL! Instead of white and blue we have on every profile, we could choose colors, I would make mine white and light purple

Please suggest by making a new topic instead of going to a random topic and start throwing your ideas.
And Scratch did not intend to ruin studios, there is a superhero called Google Extensions.
Last, the illustrations are already the most creative thing on Scratch. If all you want is just music, create a project and upload your amazing audio.

Well Im wasnt trying to be off topic, if I was then sorry ;-;
But Im here to say my ideas, and Im saying it would be cool is scratch did make an option to add music to our profiles
But i repsect your opinion, your opinion is your opinion and my opinion is my