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[Discussion] Adjusting Source Rules

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Topic Starter
yaspo
Hi, this rule about to use the Source Field just got adjusted by ppy himself

changes:

old rule wrote:

You must use the Source field if the song comes from or is directly tied to another media such as a video game, movie, series, etc. Website names, album names, or BMS are not acceptable sources. If the song was featured or tied to a media after it was released, the source field is optional. osu! may be used as a source for osu!'s Featured Artist content. If a song has multiple potential sources, any options are valid. For remixes, arrangements, or covers based upon the original song, the source(s) of the original song would apply in the same way.

new rule wrote:

You must use the Source field if the song comes from or is directly tied to another media such as a video game, movie, series, web site, community etc. If the song was featured or tied to a media after it was released, the source field should not be used. If a song has multiple potential sources, any option is valid. For remixes, arrangements, or covers based upon the original song, the source(s) of the original song would apply in the same way.
0. osu! can not longer be used as a source for featured artist tracks unless they are marked with an osu! icon on the FA listing, this is not up for discussion.

Other suggestions/changes include
1. websites can be used as source such as Newgrounds (think "x is a Newgrounds Artist") and potentially even Soundcloud, Youtube, etc.
2. BMS can be allowed as source
3. Album name disallowed as source is removed they're still disallowed
4. osu! as source can be used for custom songs for osu tournaments, for example ooparts

The goal of this thread:
Go through which of these suggestions make sense and which ones don't. Adjust the rule to a middle ground or make new rules to fill in gaps. Ideally the result is malleable enough to allow edge cases.
Noffy
If the song was featured or tied to a media after it was released, the source field should not be used
This is so hard to check for though??? Some songs are super obscure before being added to the media and their main identity is as x thing's song. Especially in older media like old TV shows or movies where it's not well documented and hard to check for. Anything before 2010 becomes really challenging with this method.

Imagine you and everyone only know a song for being in a rhythm game, and someone comes along with something like "oh it was released on an album 6 months earlier"

And then you have to check if the artist mentioned "oh I made it for upcoming x y z " which is usually on social media or poorly archived news sites. Sounds like a disaster to check for.

This basically makes it REQUIRED you HAVE to confirm if the song came first or not to HAVE TO or HAVE NOT TO use the source.

IN MEDIA -> POPULAR ASSOCIATION -> CAN USE SOURCE

is ideal.

This also currently disallows stuff like Re:Re using the Erased anime as a source even though that's a huge association for the TV Size??

Or listing songs used in Ib with Ib as the source when that's the PRIMARY way people know those songs. They were released before hand and added later. Now it can't use the popular associated source?? Similar goes for other small projects too.

This part of the change sounds like a huge L. The rest seems fine but this part is NOT good.
Annabel
this just makes things way more tedious than they need to be.

examples of why this is not preferred:

- any non-original anime song shouldnt be using the anime as the source

- any rhythm game song not made for the game (ie anything not a sdvx contest song) should not be using the game as the source

only upside is the fa stuff cuz it keeps the osu original stuff with the correct source but I'm not seeing the benefit for other stuff.

--

other suggested changes were pretty much worked out of the mix across the years for a reason? bms, yt, sc, etc are where you can acquire songs and not actual concrete sources. I wouldnt really agree with making them valid sources again cuz they're not comparable to games, shows, or movies cuz at that rate you could say anything is from yt.
Mordred

yaspo wrote:

0. osu! can not longer be used as a source for featured artist tracks unless they are marked with an osu! icon on the FA listing, this is not up for discussion.
always thought using osu as a source was dumb unless it's something like ooparts


yaspo wrote:

1. websites can be used as source such as Newgrounds (think "x is a Newgrounds Artist") and potentially even Soundcloud, Youtube, etc.
terrible idea


yaspo wrote:

3. Album name disallowed as source is removed
way too late to do this now, would only create insane amounts of confusion, there should be an entirely new field for album names + wtf do you do when it has a source and an album? forcing a priority is retarded


yaspo wrote:

4. osu! as source can be used for custom songs for osu tournaments, for example ooparts
fine


also agree with what eiri and noffy said
fieryrage
suggestion 0 is fine
suggestion 1 doesn't make sense, using "Soundcloud" or "YouTube" as a source is pointless (ESPECIALLY YouTube as literally every song ever conceived is on there) -- having this as an option just makes metadata even more of a complicated mess than it already is
suggestion 2 similar reasoning to suggestion 1
suggestion 3 this is literally what tags are for
suggestion 4 is fine (basically just an addendum to suggestion 0, isn't it?)

suggestions 1-3 just needlessly complicate metadata and make songs even more of a chore to find sources for

virtually any recently released song can be labeled as from "YouTube" or "Spotify" alongside the album those songs come from (if they're part of an album) -- that's 3 potential sources you can use, and 3 sources that are entirely unnecessary because tags already exist to cover all of these. if a song was made exclusively on youtube and released there, for example, then just put "youtube" in the tags. there's no need to have it as the source. phasing that out and having everything under sources makes tags completely useless except for guest difficulty mappers.

you can say the same thing for anime/TV/movies/video game sources (i.e. they should just be tags), but the difference is, a majority of people directly associate songs made for those media to them. this gives much more of a justification for it to be labeled as a source, because that is the main way people have heard of the song. i can almost guarantee you absolutely zero people associate the song "I'm A Believer" by Smash Mouth to the album "Smash Mouth", or "All Star" to the album "Astro Lounge" -- and that's just two random examples.

that's what the source field should be used for, imo -- when a song is either directly made for some piece of media (as is the case with most anime openings/endings/inserts), or is heavily associated with a piece of media (going back to the previous example, "All Star" would make way more sense using either "Shrek" or "Mystery Men" as its source, despite both the movies releasing after the album the song came from).

plus what mordred mentioned about this change being way too late, it'd pretty much cause metadata consistency to become nonexistent
Nao Tomori
literally none of these make sense. even the 0th one, because the reason osu as source is a thing is because source can be used for any of the media a song appears in officially rather than just things that the song was commissioned for (which seems like one of the goals? but not really cuz youtube / album isnt a media??).

websites should not be used as a source unless the song is explicitly tied to them, like if slither.io had some theme song that someone wanted to map. otherwise osu should also be usable as a source since you can get songs there.

bms is a file type not a source. that would be like putting .tja as a source for any taiko song. bms of fighters contests, ok maybe arguable as it's a media event, but not just bms by itself.

album name - just no. it's not the source media, it's just the album name. the point of the field is highlighting the source media the song is from, which an album doesn't meet.
moonpoint
1, 2 and 3 are silly for reasons already stated above, especially agreeing with Mordred regarding a hypothetical Album field in the future... 0 and 4 are entirely reasonable though IMO
Hishiro Chizuru
So can I do for example
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

and it's perfectly legitimate ?? ? ?
HomieLove
osu! as source only for songs that are explicitly made for the game like ooparts and one one is all I was asking for, good change

pretty much agree with everything eiri-, noffy and mordred already said
AJT
can i inquire as to who was consulted before pushing this and if no-one then why not

also disagree with 1, 2 and 3 for obvious reasons that have been stated already
Quenlla
Limiting osu! as a source makes sense

Everything other part of the rule does not make sense at the slightlest. Stuff like BOFU and the such should be allowed but really shouldn't go beyond that or we will make everything extremely convoluted.
Chromate
my opinion: Always force media of first appearance. If it first appeared in BMS, it should be BMS, if it first appeared in osu, it should be osu!, if it first appeared in Youtube, it should be Youtube, and if it first appeared in an album then it should be that album's name or None, preferrably. Everything else goes similar to what I've listed.
Topic Starter
yaspo
If the song was featured or tied to a media after it was released, the source field should not be used
oh god i didn't even notice this, yeah that's the kind of digwork we want to avoid

Pretty much agree with everything so far.

The logic behind 1 and 2 is more to use some kind of website exclusivity as a valid form of sourcing, eg. the artist only exists on Newgrounds so they are a "Newgrounds Artist" and have Newgrounds as source.
This logic seems bad though because
a. re-uploading the song anywhere else instantly invalidates that kind of source source, while easily accessible to artists. This is kinda dumb for metadata
b. it's hardly specific for sites that host a large variety of content, being directed to the source will not provide you with related content
Nao's sliter.io example seems valid enough as a source though, so maybe "website names" in the old rule should be changed to "media hosting platform" or something .. ? no idea

for 3, agree that albums are not media and it just creates a conflict between which the preferred or prioritized source is, both Game and Album could be equally valid

From going through here and other convos again I feel like the one editing the rule sees "Source" as a broad form of association when it's really always been used to purely cover the media a track comes from.
So yeah making these changes would be .. very .. inconsistent

can i inquire as to who was consulted before pushing this and if no-one then why not
seems like it was just people who are taking their baby steps into these systems
Topic Starter
yaspo
@Chromate you really, really should ready Noffy's post on this - while on paper valid, it's not practical in the slightest
Deca
This is an incredibly silly rulechange for obvious reasons.

Can we just have osu file format v15 to get a legitimate album field and a lot of other requested changes? Pointless rule amendments like this only serve to confuse and annoy people.
rosario wknd
0 is long overdue
1-3 are nonsense
Logic Agent
i love more confusing metadata changes

0 is ok the rest bad
UberFazz
just wanna add that i 100% agree with everyone else in the thread regarding 1/2/3 being poor decisions

basically: some sources are just straight up too generic to be useful (like "YouTube"), and separating songs from the thing that made them super popular even if it was released before it just sounds unnecessary. albums should be separated from sources for reasons mentioned by nao
Chromate
ok youtube soundcloud etc is surely a bad idea but with some thought I have come to the idea that we can use this as a starting point of discussion:

1. if the song appears in one medium*
-> use that as source.
2. if it appears in multiple mediums*
-> omit source, send all mediums to tags.

* medium includes Anime, TV Shows, Games, Programs, but does not include Music/Video Hosting websites or their links.
IOException
This kind of information should NOT be included in the .osu file in the first place, since the .osu file is immortalized in history via replays depending on its hash.

For example, if a song was later re-used for an anime, I'd like to add that anime to the source of the song, but changing the .osu file after ranking is impossible.

IMO if we want more granular metadata it should be consulted with the devs to add more fields like album, original URL, etc, or just using tags like we've always been doing.

Rule 0 is reasonable.
wafer
Agree with what Mordred & Nao have said... Don't get why this was pushed without 0 review or discussion at all

Rule 0 & 4 are fine, everything else is really questionable
tatatat
Okay so let me get this straight, Featured artist songs can't use osu! as the source field unless they were made exclusively for osu!. Okay. But unofficial custom user created content can have osu! as the source?

For the rest of the suggestions I have one big question. We have been teaching mappers for nearly a decade now how metadata should be organized, why should we throw all that away on a whim? We are going to have giant inconsistencies between currently ranked content and newly ranked content.


Suggestion 1:

websites can be used as source such as Newgrounds (think "x is a Newgrounds Artist") and potentially even Soundcloud, Youtube, etc.

On the issue of including websites in the source, there is going to be massive issues of abuse and inconsistencies. People often upload their songs to multiple websites: Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Itunes, Facebook. Which website should be used as the source? I see there being two options and both have major consequences.

Option 1: Whatever the mapper feels like. If the mapper sees the song uploaded on youtube, they can decide to put it in the source field. There is going to be hundreds of discussions on whether or not the youtube upload is official or the "main" uploaded source. What if the mapper themselves uploads the content to a website under the artist's name so they can change the source.

Option 2: Whatever website the content was uploaded on first. I'd consider this option slightly better than option 1 but it still has drawbacks. Not all websites include exact hours:minutes:seconds for content upload date so determining the original/first upload may be impractical or impossible. What if the content is uploaded at same-day 2:00PM UTC-0 across multiple websites? Which website would be the source?

Now some of the major drawbacks to including websites in the source regardless of which option would be decided upon: Nearly every single map uploaded will have a video/music hosting platform as their source. The source field will hold no value anymore. What similarities do 1 Youtube map have from another? And that is if they are uploaded on Youtube. What if the content's main upload was on an explicit website? Do we really want explicit websites in the source field? I don't think so.

Suggestion 2:

BMS can be allowed as a source.

I believe that there are major problems with this proposal. The main and glaring issue is that BMS is a file format, not a source of content. Anything could have the source as BMS if it was uploaded in that format. What if a rhythm game uses BMS as their underlying chart file format? What would be the Source field for a beatmap of a song in that game be? BMS or the rhythm game? Are we going to start having SM (Stepmania Files), BEMUSE (bemuse BMS packs), and other rhythm game file formats as sources too? That just opens a huge can of worms that needs an entire discussion of its own.

Suggestion 3:

Album name disallowed as source is removed

So what are albums? Wikipedia says "An album is a collection of audio recordings issued as a collection on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium". Albums could contain any number of media, but how does the name of the album help determine the songs source? What if a song is uploaded as a single, and then years later organized into an album by the creator? The name of an album doesn't determine where the song originated from, its just an collection of songs.

Suggestion 4

osu! as source can be used for custom songs for osu tournaments, for example ooparts

I have many questions about this, first though I am going to examine the example given. ooparts. So this is a featured artist song by the artist camellia, and was used in the capacity of an official osu! tournament. There is one massive problem with this though. In camellia's featured artist listing page, ooparts doesn't have an osu! symbol next to it. This instantly disqualifies it from having osu! in the source due to the new rule osu! can not longer be used as a source for featured artist tracks unless they are marked with an osu! icon on the FA listing, this is not up for discussion..

I personally think that this makes ooparts a poor example to be used, since having osu! in the source field would contradict our rules. But onto the rest of the suggestion.

What does osu tournaments mean? Does this mean any community tournament, or only official tournaments. If it is only official tournaments, in what capacity does it need to be official? Does it need to be one of the 4/5 world-cups held every year? OWC OTWC OCWC OM4KWC OM7KWC? Or does official tournaments mean tournaments with badges or osu!staff provided rewards. More clarification is needed on this topic.

What does custom songs mean? Does this mean songs created for the sole purpose of the "osu tournament" or songs that have no other applicable source? What if an artist uploads their song, and then 2 months later it is approved by the artist for use in a tournament. Would that song be custom for the tournament?

Why should we limit osu! as the source only to tournaments?

Shouldn't any content created solely for the purpose of osu! have the ability for osu! to be in the source field? If we are going by suggestion 1 and suggestion 2, the content was originally uploaded to the https://osu.ppy.sh website and the file format was .OSU. When the "A labour of love" contest was finished, weren't the beatmaps created for that contest permitted to have osu! in the source? Shouldn't any similar song creation contest, whether community driven or official be given that right? When people create original content for the osu! platform, shouldn't they be permitted to show it? I believe the answer is yes.

Closing thoughts


I have a question for all of you. If all of these suggestions are pushed to the ranking criteria as is, what would the source field of newly ranked beatmaps be? Lets say an artist creates an original song and schedules an upload of an album including that song to Soundcloud and Youtube simultaneously. They then create a BMS chart of that song and upload it to their personal website.

We now have 5 conflicting potential source fields. Could the source field be either Youtube or Soundcloud? They were uploaded at the exact same time. Maybe the source field will be the album the song is a part of. Or maybe the source field will be BMS since the creator made a BMS chart. Or maybe the source field should be the Website the BMS file was uploaded to.

Do you want to design the exact precedence and order that these sources should take? Because they can't all be weighted equally. Only one source is allowed in the source field (and please do NOT change that) I personally am not looking forward to the day that I have to read a flow-chart on what I should put in the source field of my beatmaps.
Ideal
0 and 4 are perfectly ok imo. everything else is a big no

for 1: how are you supposed to confirm this lol. people upload songs to sites like youtube, soundcloud etc without the artist’s permission all the time, and it makes things an absolute nightmare especially for songs that have had their original source deleted from the internet. it just would not work out in any practical scenario and is just unreasonable to be expected

for 2: BMS is a file type, not a source

for 3: this is far too confusing as previously mentioned, and it doesn’t make much sense to me to do this now. and songs that were released in albums can be featured in games, and vice versa. it doesn’t make sense to me



this sort of change really should’ve been communicated and discussed before being pushed like this, why did it just go through with no review? this is way too impactful on the ranking process and goes against the entire point of all of the metadata ruling decisions made in the past years… I’d really love to know what’s the reason behind such a sudden change
Niva
yup (as with the others) #0 is something i can definitely vouch off

---

#4 does seem to require some further clarification tho : while the suggestion is cool does it only apply to songs commissioned by the osu!team for official tournaments (such as ooparts/of ambrosia/etc), or does it apply to *every* custom song made for any osu! tournament regardless of whether the tournament is considered "official" or not?

i'm raising this concern primarily because nowadays there have been more and more custom songs/beatmaps that were specifically made for community-run tournaments fwiw, such as this one which was made for omt 2021 or this one which was made for the coffee hispanic tournament

---

as for the others uhh yeah in their current proposed form i don't really think they're a good step to take going forward :(
Ephemeral
Few problems people are bringing up with current wording:

OP points 0 & 4 are fine and most people seem to be in agreement with them.

Point 1 has people worried that people who find songs on YouTube will just use YouTube as a source, which is pretty useless and definitely not what the intent is with the wording change.

What the platform rule wording should encompass is use cases where a particular song or track comes from an artist heavily interwoven into the community of that platform, for example, using "YouTube" as a source for a map on Pewdiepie's Congratulations track would make sense (since he is a huge youtuber, the track got famous from YouTube and heavily features YouTube culture).

BN server discussion suggested this kind of use case should be leveled as an exception to the previous platform rule wording instead of omitting it entirely, and I'm inclined to agree with them completely.

Point 2 covers another shaky case where BMS technically refers to a file format to some people and a community for others. Strangely, there has never been any discussion on having events (BOFA, BOFU, etc etc) as actual sources which is extremely weird. It is logical that a track that comes from one of those events should have it as a source, such as Street's Sakura Fubuki which comes from BOFU2015, and thus should have that as it's primary source.

We need to add some wording and make this kind of thing standard since I think it solves the issue the BMS change was intended to address.

Point 3 involving album changes is a highly contentious one as people seem to be pretty split across the board as to whether a track is "sourced" from an album or simply belongs to it. My personal thoughts on this are that albums as sources should be allowed, but ONLY if there is not a higher priority game/movie/film media source instead. A track from Skyrim should therefore have Skyrim as the source, as is logical. A track that does not belong to a platform or event (as points 2 or 1 cover) could have its first-available album used as a source, as long as that album is not a single of the same name as the track itself.

Otherwise, the biggest issue is with this wording:

If the song was featured or tied to a media after it was released, the source field should not be used.
This introduces research requirements that won't be met and will be argued extensively over. It cannot exist in this wording or we are going to lose thousands of man hours to absolutely pointless arguments for something that really does not matter all that much.

I think establishing a series of 'floating priorities' as above is the best way to go with the Source field, and codifying them. For example:

  1. Has the track featured prominently on a platform with strong cultural links to said platform and is the primary way most people will know of the track (such as a career YouTuber releasing their track on YouTube)? If so, use the platform as the source. Otherwise, platforms should be avoided as sources.
  2. Was the track used in (or made for) a specific game, film, movie in which it is prominently known for? If so, use that feature as the source. The track must be an osu! original to use osu! as the source in this way.
  3. Was the track created for a particular event or music contest (BOFU, BOFA, A Labour of Love, osu! remix contests)? If so, use the event or contest as the source.
  4. If the track does not fall under any of the categories above, does it belong to an album? If so, use the first album the track chronologically appears in as its source. If this album is considered a 'single' with a name the same as the track with very little alteration, do not use it as a source.
  5. If the track does not meet any category here, the source field should be left blank.
People have pointed out to me that album has not been used in source for many years and thus adding it now might be a bit too late to the party, so to speak. There are open issues to create a new 'album' metadata field, so if that is being pursued in earnest, source should probably not be extended to cover albums.
Mordred
Album in source is still a terrible idea, I've said this many times before and I'll keep saying it, it's simply too late to start doing that now

Assume you have a source that looks like シェルノサージュ〜失われた星へ捧ぐ詩. Assume you have another map with 死を司る神の名を持つ者 in the source field. How does the average osu user know which one the album, and which one the game is? Album names have not been in the source for so many years that it would only cause confusion.
Nao Tomori
i agree with those priorities except i dont think framing them as a "flowchart" works well - it should be more like a check-the-box activity to determine POSSIBLE sources for a song, then the mapper can choose the one they want after figuring out the relevant ones. that's actually what people do currently anyway; the only change is adding events to the previous rules and cultural phenomena like pewdiepie videos as an exception to the no websites rule that used to exist.

tldr: revert, add the rule about osu as source only for osu-exclusives, add "events" to list of valid sources, add youtube exception
Vulkin
A small thought I have with this...

I personally don't think it's a good idea to implement things as YouTube or Newgrounds as potential sources for songs from popular content creators because it makes it feel as the song belongs to the entirety of the website, rather than the community of the content creator, devaluing the community itself, and makes things way too general, which is, as far as I know, not the point of Metadata.
Noffy
Based off the OLD RULE FROM BEFORE TODAY this is the changes I would suggest to best encompass current discussion.


propose wrote:

You must use the Source field if the song comes from or is directly tied to another media such as a video game, movie, series, etc. If the song was featured or tied to a media after it was released, the source field is optional. If a song has multiple potential sources, any options are valid. For remixes, arrangements, or covers based upon the original song, the source(s) of the original song would apply in the same way.
  1. Website names such as YouTube or Newgrounds may only be used as sources when the song is tied to specific cultural phenomena related to the platform, or the song is composed as a website theme/background song.
  2. In cases where a song compilation/remix/medley/etc. has songs without a common source, the sources must be put in the tags instead of the source field (unless the compilation is prominently tied to a source itself).
  3. osu! itself should never be used in the source field except in cases where the track was specifically created for osu! (also known as an osu! original), such as commissioned tournament tiebreaker tracks.
Album names
I would leave out album names entirely as they have been very definitively NOT A SOURCE on osu! for YEARS (edit: at least 6 years by looking at archives like this) now and changing it at this point would be changing the entire function of the source field in the game as of right now. I think working towards having its own field would be best.

Events like BOFU
Not currently in my proposal but not unheard of. Just needs to be worded with care so we don't end up with confusing sources such as:
  1. song contests for media where the contest name is the same as the media. songs that didn't win and get added to the media having it as a source is misleading.
  2. how events like concerts where the song premiered at the concert should be handled. Often difficult to trace especially for smaller artists.
For the question of "which option to use" I believe a basic guideline which HAS AN ONGOING THREAD HERE: community/forums/topics/1417008?n=1 to cover that globally with other metadata fields in terms of preference would be better.
kadoen

Ephemeral wrote:

Was the track created for a particular event or music contest (BOFU, BOFA, A Labour of Love, osu! remix contests)? If so, use the event or contest as the source.
This would be a great addition in my opinion. Maybe it could be specified that the standard abbreviation of the event (if it exists) should be used as source, e.g. "BOFXVII" instead of "THE BMS OF FIGHTERS XVII -VISION THE RETRO FUTURE-", as these can get long and unwieldy sometimes.
Kibbleru
hmm, music sharing websites as source seems.. weird.

BMS -> yes, obv, i think it was disallowed for dmca reasons or smth?

album name.. neutral.
Nevo
Albums being allowed doesn't make sense to me if the field is thought of as where a song COMES from.

YouTube and stuff just makes no sense whatsoever to me since that's not a viable source of the song unless it's like from some official YouTube original or something.

I don't know anything about BMS so no comments there but yeah for the most part I don't get why or how these are reasonable.
maot
Topics 0 and 4 are pretty much fine.

About topics 1-3:

  1. Albums shouldn't be on source field, since it can bring ambiguity (there are multiple examples of the same song being part of different albums).
  2. As pretty much everyone said above, using websites as sources shouldn't be a thing with the exception of official content. We should treat them as we treat osu! with the topic 0 (if they are "official" content it's fine).
  3. About BMS, i'm not sure, but the fact the term comes after a file format is kinda wierd IMHO. If there are contests coming after the term they should be allowed as valid sources tho.
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