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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

So can I do for example
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

and it's perfectly legitimate ?? ? ?

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

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

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.

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.

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

@Chromate you really, really should ready Noffy's post on this - while on paper valid, it's not practical in the slightest

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.

0 is long overdue
1-3 are nonsense

i love more confusing metadata changes

0 is ok the rest bad

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

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.

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.