Yepp... This seems like one of those users who gives the Geometry Dash-community its piss-poor reputation. They favorite'd their own work as well. And they only voted for 2 submissions so far - "probably" their own. This is why early ratings don't mean anything...

Now that I'm done stating the obvious, I'd like to take advantage of an opportunity to teach something:

Welcome to the fine Art of 'Reporting People'

In general, users who do not read the rules they agreed to and do shady s*it are not "good" people. If you contact them discreetly via PM to inform them that what they do is wrong, they will act immaturely in over 80% of the cases. (It was worse in "the olden days", btw...) If they are caught and you make it clear to them that it was you who reported them, they will also have a strong tendency to act immature.

If you look at the way other users here link to the people they talk about, you will notice that nobody here uses @[ILikeTheSmellOfMyOwnFarts] but rather links to them manually. They do this because that way, the person they link to doesn't get a little, automated notification, leading them right to your post. Editing that @[PlzWhitelistMySunoAITracksForGD] out in post will (to the best of my knowledge) not remove the notification. And due to the way the forums are set up, posts cannot be deleted by their writers and it was already too late to edit the post by the time I saw it.

What you could do would be to ask Mr. Fulp (who is asleep right now, because it's the middle of the night on a bloody Sunday) to delete your post and hope that it still happens in time. Otherwise you could toughen it out and block the user in question if they are getting too annoying.

I hope this helps.

P.S.: If you're reading this and you're from the future, feel free to link to this post or copy&adapt the text above as needed. I'm not precious about these things. The most important thing is to help those who need said help.

I just did it so viewers could Have easier access to his account, but yeah, good point 😂, if he starts bitching at me, I’ll just block him and report him to fulp, I’ll be sure to use manual links other then notices

@G2961 brought my attention to a suspicious song that was frontpaged. He suspects it was made with Udio AI and I share his suspicions. The user: Vunks.

When I listened to it, the first thing I noticed was that the bitrate was not 320kbps, despite what the metadata says. I ran it through a spectrogram and sure enough, there's a massive cutoff at 16kHz, which is indicative of a bitrate of 128kbps. While Udio AI v1.5 isn't listed as a contributing artist, that can easilly be altered if you aren't completely tech illiterate. There's a possibility that he didn't export it properly, but that doesn't explain why the file is claiming to be 320kbps. Why would the file metadata be mismatched with the actual bitrate? Usually this is because the user manually changed it, or it's an Udio generation, which always labels the song as 320kbps, even if it's not even close to that. (This is different than Suno AI, which always outputs at 192kbps.) I also find it strange that this supposedly experienced musician is "still working on [his] style." Lastly, some areas in the track sound a little strange. For example, what happens at 1:37? While I understand that it could just be an effect Vunks chose to use, I also recognize that it sounds a bit like an artifact from an AI model. I might have missed something or misunderstood something about music production, but given the mismatch of the bitrates, the user's comments, and a couple strange spots in the track, I think it was made with Udio. @ADR3-N, what do you think?

Spectrogram:

I checked his only other song, and it appears to be more real than not to me. There's no issues with the bitrate, and it doesn't trigger my internal AI alarm the same way the other track did.

Should I ask him about when he made this song? if his answer is like, "I wrote this song just recently," then he can be asked to send the project file as a zip archive, which will also contain sounds that could be rendered as a wav file, or one-shots that were used in his song. if he refuses to send and he won't want to prove his innocence, then I can assume he's cheating using udio.

I think this account used alt accounts to vote their own submission, I just don’t believe that out of eight listeners, five voted for it, it’s just not possible.

You can just ask him to screen record the project itself with his phone or something -- it's less invasive than asking for someone's stems! Generally we discourage users from doing this kind of investigating directly, because it can result in a lot of backlash from the users in question or come off as suspicious. But of course, it's a free internet; as long as you aren't harassing, you're technically not doing anything wrong.

Bear in mind that Suno and Udio use sound templates, so to speak, with their AI. It's like they only use certain instruments. If I hear these in a submission, it's a dead ringer to me.

Sorry I haven't been monitoring the thread as actively the past few days. I was exposed to chlorine gas at work and I've been sick for a few days. You can always @ me though. I WILL see it. Just might take me a while.

It's possible they were in a discord group or something. At least 2 of those are reviews, which can be checked by admin @TomFulp if they are alt accounts. They were also scouted shortly after those reviews.

I had several cases when my song had 8 listens and 5 ratings, but I have 1.1 thousand subscribers, but he has FOUR!

Yes you are right! For some reason, I didn't think that this was somehow wrong, so yes - a video, for example, with a .flp project will not be so suspicious.

Looked into it and at the least there's no IP matches between accounts and it's not a bunch of new accounts. I'd ere on the side of their friends coming to vote for their song, along with some other long established accounts.

It turns out that he is not to blame for anything and it's just that his friends voted for his song very quickly

Most of these were published in the last 48 hours.

Suno AI:

An older user that fell into the trap of Suno:

I highly suspect that these two songs are both Suno. There might be some additions to them, but I think that it's mostly AI. Look at the cutoff in the spectrograms. (19kHZ is indicative of a 192kbps bitrate, the max output of Suno AI.)

Spectrograms:

Stolen:

Low bitrate for some reason:

Suno AI:

My brain said "Suno" upon hearing this, and sure enough it was a 192kbps bitrate. Not sure if it's actually AI, but that's what I initially thought.

Groovepad:

All these songs have either "groovepad" or "groovepad team" credited in the metadata. I know it specifically says you can't use Groovepad in the audio guidelines, but I thought it best to bring this up because I know there was a recent discussion about whether bandlab songs can be on Newgrounds. I saw a reddit post where someone "read the EULA" and found out that you can't redistribute songs created from the app, but when I read it myself, I saw no mentions of the music people ceate, just the legal terms for use of the software. Reading into one of Groovepad's help articles isn't much help either, because while it says "the sound packs that are produced by our artists and are available in the app are royalty-free", the same page also states, "you are not allowed to sell, distribute, sublicense or in any other way transfer or grant any rights to the loops or sound packs of the app, as is, to any third party, or use them in another similar app." I'm not sure if this is simply refering to the standalone loops or if it could possibly be applied to the songs created from those loops (and could see it be argued either way). I'm not sure how much of these songs are loop spam, as I've never used any kind of loop app or know what to look for. Also, it appears that Groovepad songs require attribution to the original app, although this may be only for comercial use (as that is what is specifically titled by the help article).

Drone is NOT AI!

Drum'Drop is NOT AI too! This is just FL Studio's Basic Kit drums

I didn't report it, so I must have just put in the wrong link. Whoops.

That's good. I think it was just the bitrate that made me initially assume AI.

A few Suno songs:

Hello everyone, sorry for bothering you, first time I post something here. Thanks to a very competent user on the Elite Guard Barrack who reported a disgusting video involving bestiality with stolen images, I dig a bit in the profile of this user who blatantly admits to want to use AI-generated music with Suno AI, here the journal:

https://angenwolf.newgrounds.com/news

I suggest to keep an eye on everything that will be made. Again sorry for bothering you, I am new in this kind of situations but I appreciate all the work you and others do to keep clean this wonderful site.

Suno AI:

This person is creating multiple accounts to evade a ban (I’m assuming). They uploaded many AI tracks before on their older account (13 to be exact), and now they are trying again on their new one. @ADR3-N, can you please take a look?

The song:

The accounts:

https://avaxlumino.newgrounds.com/

https://avaxluminoo.newgrounds.com/

Udio AI:

“Electric Pulse” lists Udio v1.5 as the contributing artist, and I think the rest of the tracks are AI too (although I’m less certain). It looks like they tried to use an AI stem splitter to separate out the vocals from “The Cementary” (hahaha spelling). 

Earrape:

Silence:

Hey you guys, just found this, posted from 2008. Is this allowed because I'm hearing parts of the original song. You tell me, but again, stolen materials shouldn't be posted here https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/130503

Most of these were uploaded in the last 24 hours. 

Suno AI:

Here’s the spectrogram for that last one, since the bitrate was manually changed:

This user is scouted! 

It’s a whole account of Suno songs. They “collabed” with another Suno uploader.  

The account: xren-music

The user they “collabed” with: x0r0z

Suno songs:

Pretty sure this is them too, as a linked youtube channel has similar Suno AI lofi songs, and it’s the same name:

xrengdm

Stolen:

Suspicious:

Here's a few more:

Suno AI:

Spam/Stolen:

This user is scouted with two AI tracks.

Here's a few more too:

I just wanted to say, that i am impressed by all the good work of all contributers of this project! I always admired your work (but never told you before) - it must be tedious and obnoxious in a kind. So big props to you!

Hello, I am stupid and forget how to report, is this kind of "two random samples playing incoherently for 10 seconds" thing worth flagging? I believe it should fall under the "no stock loop / unoriginal arrangement" rule but I guess it barely even counts as an arrangement.

Noise / Ear Damage:

These are just an effect on top of the original material:

original by waterflame. at the 0:41 mark.

original is hello by omfg.

I don't know the source for this one, but it's basically just a bunch of random songs this 1 user couldn't have created.

this is a music box recording, assuming this user didn't make the music box I believe it should be flagged.

i typed some of the lyrics into google and its a song from that new descendants movie, of all things.

@Leavesz

In my opinion, ear damaging audio should always be flagged (as well as rated low, because trolls will always vote 5 on their spam submissions, so others fall for their crap). Regardless of whether it was malicious or due to incompetence you wouldn't want other users to get physically hurt. Same in the Movie Portal, btw.

I can't imagine Pingu or ADR3-N going "Yeah, but it's 'artistic' ear damaging noise..." ;)

As for the music box recording... Even if I were to play devil's advocate: The tune is Pop! Goes the Weasel, which isn't copyrighted but it's not their original creation either. One might consider it a lazy cover. The wind/distant thunder sounds might have been added intentionally.

Overall, I fail to see why it was even uploaded here... Under other circumstances I'd say "Let's see what the artist has to say.", but said artist just uploaded the file without providing any information to go by, both on the submission as well as their completely empty profile. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it's probably a certain type of user who hopes to get scouted (From this? How?!) without even knowing how the scouting system works - so that they can upload Suno AI-tracks for reasons that have nothing to do with Newgrounds or its community to begin with.

I always flag painful audio and silence even though there's no specific category for it in the report tab. I usually put it under the "spam" category, as it's the closest one that matches. Actually, I feel like the spam category on audio reports should be updated, as I have only once seen a shady link on an audio submission (after 1500 flags), and never what I would call a "marketing scheme". Maybe I've just gotten lucky. The audio guidelines give examples of "white noise, blowing into the microphone, screaming, and text-to-speech" as things that shouldn't be on the audio portal, as well as stating that submissions shouldn't be "painful to listen to". I imagine it could be revised to something like "Promoting shady links, audio is painful to listen to, blatant ad." The wording and sentence structuring could be different, but it get's down the general idea. I know it misses on TTS, and maybe white noise, but it hits most of the obnoxious submissions I find. A new category could always be added too, but (in my opinion) I think it would be mostly pointless and create clutter in the report tab. Also, if the description for the spam report can't be changed exclusively for audio, then what we have now is fine. I'm sure most people will logically use the spam tab as I have been doing. I kinda want to (at) Tom to sugest this, but does anyone else have input or sugestions?

Honestly, I sometimes see kiddos upload their audio and then type in the author comments how they're confused as to why their (often AI) track isn't working in GD. "What is this scouting system? Never heard of it!" - a GD Suno AI uploader, probably.

I think "Malicious" (Which is used in the Movie & Games Portals) would be a more than fitting addition.

Ears are technically hardware and they are extremely expensive to repair - which is not even possible in all cases.

I write a lot of reports in a lot of different systems. Fittingly, the categorizations are as divers as the different kinds of media.

For comparison:

In the Movie Portal (which is a war-field), 70% of my flags are "Spam". Not because it fits the definition but rather because no other definition fits... If stuff doesn't fit any other category you use what you have. The rest is almost exclusively about the unlicensed use of licensed music.

In the Art Portal (which is behaving well most of the time and then terrible the rest of the time), about 80% are about the finer points of age rating, where I often write stuff like "Between "E" and "T" because this is essentially a pin-up, but I'm very of the fence about this - you decide". The rest is "This is almost certainly stolen/traced."

In the Audio Portal, 95% of what I report on is audio that "overly relies on the work of others"-stuff (Music Category). The rest is about silence, exploding speakers, and... a joke that stops being funny after the 10th time it happens... (AKA blatantly plagiarized work - sometimes with a full letter of confession attached, sometimes "How is this 'remixed'? It sounds exactly the same as the original...")

The more I talk about this, the more I think this is not so much a discussion to have with Mr. Fulp and more a discussion that should happen between the Audio Portal Moderation Team and the users who flagged a lot of tracks. Preferable in another thread here in the Audio Forum.

I think that is a communication-issue that the Geometry Dash-community has, but that the NG community has to suffer from.

While I know that not all our users coming to us from that community are like that, the users who are like that are the ones you notice the most. At times, I want to suggest NG changing the download url for Audio Portal submissions and redirecting all of the old urls to a single file that their game translates to an extremely easy 20-second obstacle course reading "Read the f***ing FAQ and the Audio Portal rules before you register an account on Newgrounds to "make your own levels"! Your game will return to normal on YYYY-MM-DD – Sincerely, The Newgrounds Audio Portal." ( Only for a week or so... )

But if we were to do that, all the innocent players would be "rightfully" angry at Newgrounds... Newgrounds, who provides them with "levels" for their game free of charge and with no economic benefit - just because a certain someone is so nice.

What those players need, aside from the ability to communicate, is an option in the game to just play the files they provide on their own without the "extremely complicated" step of "Just install the non-browser version of the game and replace one of the audio files with your own."

But that's out of our hands...

To people from the future who might read this and think I'm being mean to them or their people: In the past year I have only ever knowingly encountered two members of the GD-community here on Newgrounds who were not like that - one of them rather recently. Given those circumstances, I would say that I am displaying an extremely moderate and forgiving response here.

Read the rules and conditions you agree to before agreeing to them and only agree to them if you are okay with them. My soul belongs to bumcheekcity (if they can find it). I am not complaining and I am sure bumcheekcity would take good care of it. Are you fine with somebody owning your soul? If not, then maybe you should have read those ToS for your VoIP service a bit more carefully... It's too late now.

Stolen from: https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-so-988423341/for-me

It looks like the guy uploaded the same stolen file three times to try and get scouted for GD?