The audio recording was seized by the copyright holders, what should I do? VKontakte music doesn't work? VK deleted it! Switch to the "smart news feed"

On the Russian social network VKontakte, which is famous for its pirated content, user complaints have become more frequent that a large number of recordings were removed from their playlists by copyright holders. Some users, in particular singer Victoria Deineko, received letters asking her to delete a song allegedly uploaded to social network illegal.

The seizure of audio recordings at the request of copyright holders has already happened before, but these were isolated cases. Now music is disappearing en masse, and for some users, for unknown reasons, the VK Saver client, which allows them to download music from VKontakte, crashes.

Many users admit that they prefer the social network VKontakte, primarily because of access to free music.

Some suggest that individual compositions can be saved from seizure by simply renaming them in your “Audio Recordings” section so that the copyright holder cannot identify them through a search.

However, there are also users who were not affected. First of all, these are those whose audio recordings are hidden by privacy settings and are available only to friends.

UPDATE: The editors of Roem.ru have obtained a screenshot of the letter that is sent to VKontakte users. Apparently, Victoria Daineko complained about one of these letters:

As Zuckerberg Will Call reports, Elena Trusova, a lawyer at Goltsblat BLP, on whose behalf the content removal warnings are sent, said that she represents the interests of labels such as Sony, Universal and Warner. She has no right to comment on what is happening, and the copyright holders will decide on a PR strategy in this regard later.

Meanwhile, a source among major copyright holders who collaborates with VKontakte unofficially reported that the administration of the social network sends messages to users on its own initiative, without any special sanction from copyright holders.

Let us remind you. A notification will be sent after links to prohibited videos are included in the register of prohibited information.

This phrase, addressed to the founder of VKontakte and the former general director of the company of the same name, will remain a household name for many years to come. Heated debate flared up after the sudden replacement of the system of expressing one’s mood and communicating with friends, beloved by millions of VK users, with the analogue of microblogs familiar to Twitter users. Initially, the founder of the network and the initiator of the upgrade, Pavel Durov, said that the dissatisfaction would subside in a couple of days, and users would like it new design pages. Nevertheless, the innovation instantly caused real hysteria in the Internet community, which did not subside even after weeks. Hundreds of thousands of indignant visitors to the resource united in protest groups: “We are against the microblog! Give us back the wall!” (the community had more than 520 thousand members) or “Bring back the wall! We are against the microblog! (almost 280 thousand).

As a result, a violent reaction forced Durov, as users define it, to “turn on the reverse” - after almost two weeks, the social network VKontakte returned the old, familiar design, although leaving it on par with the innovation. In order to return the wall, in the settings it was necessary to check the option “Always show information about me in expanded form on my page.” The microblog service has also been preserved, but has moved down to the place of the “wall”.

"Durov, return the rating"

A similar, but much smaller event took place in May 2011, after the administration of the social network VKontakte decided to remove the small “rating bar” under the avatar, which up to a certain point showed the degree of completion of the page, and after 100% - secretly indicated the coolness of this or that another user.
Even at the dawn of VKontakte’s popularity, a lot depended on the rating - for example, users with less than 30% were once unable to view other people’s pages. And on the contrary, incomprehensible to a simple user, but very important for lovers of popularity, “101 percent or more” made it possible to gain fans, as well as to appear in certain lists (both among users and in groups) in the top positions. By the way, many even paid real money for this (7 rubles for 1 point). It is not surprising that when in May 2011 the administration decided to abandon ratings altogether, top users in the past were indignant. However, their dissatisfaction did not go further than outpourings on the Internet.

Only once in the history of VKontakte has it returned an option from five years ago, to support 11-year-old Stepan Savelyev. The unpopular boy was bullied by his classmates, who ridiculed him for the small number of likes on his page, as well as for his childhood fascination with dinosaurs.

Cancellation of a single page access restriction

In February of the same 2011, the social network VKontakte prohibited users from limiting access to their statuses, which once again caused considerable indignation. Now any member of the social network has acquired the ability to view personal information of other users: not only statuses, but also photographs, audio and video recordings, a “wall”, gifts, as well as notes and a list of friends, although previously the user could make his page completely private with one click . The innovation extended to the data that the account creator left publicly available during registration, only limiting access to his page as a whole.
As Pavel Durov noted then, this decision will make the social network “more consistent and understandable.” However, social network members dissatisfied with the innovation united in a special group “We are against forced open walls! We are for non-interference in privacy!" They noted that the administration does not have the right to make their personal information and correspondence on the walls public.

However, we note that even now almost all data about yourself can be made private. In the privacy settings, it is possible to restrict access to certain persons to your information on several points: basic page information, my photos, list of groups, and so on - in other words, almost everything that you would like to hide from prying eyes. And in some cases, the “blacklist” function will help.

Removing music content, or #returnmusic to VK

The anti-piracy law adopted by the State Duma in 2013 caused a lot of noise among the multi-million audience of the most popular social network in Russia. One fine day, thousands of users, instead of their favorite tracks that they were accustomed to listening to in audio recordings on VK, found a message: “The audio recording has been withdrawn from public access due to an appeal from the copyright holder. You can delete the audio recording that violates copyright.” Later it became known that, first of all, the compositions were removed, the right to sell them in Russia belonged to Universal Music Russia.
The outrage of social network users, who were suddenly deprived of access to tens of thousands of tracks, knew no bounds. The hashtag #returnmusictoVK on Twitter even briefly took a place in the global trends of the microblogging service.

At the same time, the famous “Cold Games”, “Bathtub without Doors”, “Soap with Saury” and “Sweet Dwarf” appeared on the social network - this is how enterprising users, who figured out how to bypass the bans, designated popular performers Coldplay, Lana del Rey, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez.

There were other sparkling names. But gradually the wave of renamings died down. Meanwhile, there were reports in the media that the network administration plans to resolve the issue of free placement of music in audio recordings with the largest record companies. In particular, it was indicated that the social network was negotiating with Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music to find a compromise option in which users could legally listen to music, and labels could make money from it.

Switch to the "smart news feed"

A wave of negativity was also caused by the idea of ​​the new management of the social network VKontakte to introduce the so-called smart news feed - a mode in which news is shown to the user not in chronological order, but according to the principle of “interesting first.” The idea is not new - Facebook previously set the standard for the news feed generation algorithm. In 2016, not only VK, but also Twitter switched to its version of EdgeRank. VKontakte Boris Dobrodeev, such a system allows you to deal with information overload, because it automatically cuts off spam. However, some users noted that “as usual, the network put them in front of fact", automatically "throwing" into a new mode. Note that now the scandalous mode can be regulated - turn on or off the "interesting first" function above the box with recommended communities.

Not all bloggers are aware of these events yet, because they don’t really like all kinds of social networks)

However, I now actively hang out on VKontakte, mainly for work purposes, but sometimes I listen to music there - it’s convenient, you don’t need to download, you don’t need to buy, you don’t need to search on different shitty sites with free mp3s where you can catch viruses.

But just the other day the freebie ended.

VKontakte has begun the fight against piracy and is deleting music due to copyright infringement!

Now, if you are trying to play your favorite track, you may well see the following message: “The audio recording has been withdrawn from public access due to an appeal from the copyright holder.”

When I found out about this disgrace a couple of days ago, I immediately ran to check my playlist, but ugh ugh so far everything is in place) Meanwhile, quite a lot of music files have already been deleted from VK, and the process continues.

And to hell with it if they removed all the popsicles. So they raised their hand to the sacred - AC/DC, Rammstein, 30STM and much more.

Of course, I understand everything, copyrights and all that, piracy is bad, stealing is illegal, etc. But something tells me that major music labels are not starving anyway, and by prohibiting people from listening to music they are acting like sellers of air) But this is my opinion, I may be wrong.

Why is VKontakte music deleted? I honestly have no idea. As far as I could find out the major muses. labels ( really big ones, like Sony and not sharashkin’s offices) united and dashed off a slander.

There is also an opinion that this is due to the recently adopted bill in Russia to combat piracy and copyright infringement. But be that as it may, this does not bode well for the average user - torrents may be next in line(

By the way, Russian ingenuity showed itself here too - people are actively posting deleted compositions online under encrypted names) So 30STM is now called “30 seconds to the well” and Nirvana is the World of Bath :)

On the Russian social network VKontakte, which is famous for its pirated content, user complaints have become more frequent that a large number of entries have been removed from their playlists by copyright holders. Some users, in particular singer Victoria Deineko received letters asking her to remove a song allegedly uploaded to the social network illegally.

The seizure of audio recordings at the request of copyright holders has already happened before, but these were isolated cases. Now music is disappearing en masse, and for some users, for unknown reasons, the VK Saver client, which allows them to download music from VKontakte, crashes.

Many users admit that they prefer the social network VKontakte, primarily because of access to free music.

Some suggest that individual compositions can be saved from seizure by simply renaming them in your “Audio Recordings” section so that the copyright holder cannot identify them through a search.

However, there are also users who were not affected. First of all, these are those whose audio recordings are hidden by privacy settings and are available only to friends.

UPDATE: The editors of Roem.ru have obtained a screenshot of the letter that is sent to VKontakte users. Apparently, Victoria Daineko complained about one of these letters:

As Zuckerberg Will Call reports, Elena Trusova, a lawyer at Goltsblat BLP, on whose behalf the content removal warnings are sent, said that she represents the interests of labels such as Sony, Universal and Warner. She has no right to comment on what is happening, and the copyright holders will decide on a PR strategy in this regard later.

Meanwhile, a source among major copyright holders who collaborates with VKontakte unofficially reported that the administration of the social network sends messages to users on its own initiative, without any special sanction from copyright holders.

Let us remind you. A notification will be sent after links to prohibited videos are included in the register of prohibited information.

Ways to bypass the filter

1. Changing the tonal balance of the entire work, or part of it, that is, processing with an equalizer:

In my opinion, this is the simplest method. Let's look at a few cases of using EQ:

Here I immediately present the result of what I came to; in fact, I unwisely began to try to “feed” an audio recording with a slightly changed tonal balance to VKontakte, so that it was practically impossible to hear the difference (for example, I used low-pass filters and high-pass filters with very soft settings - the difference in sound was negligible). VKontakte rejected posts with such changes, but, interestingly, accepted posts processed like this:

This means that recognition occurs only in the mid-frequency region, high and low frequencies are not affected. The first option is to equalize the entire track: you need to cut out a small area of ​​the mid-frequency range. I tried to apply EQ only to a small section of the track - it didn’t work.

2. Adding noise

Gorthauer87 suggested “a little mixing of some noise that is imperceptible to the ear.” The idea is correct; in fact, it was the very first one that came to my mind. It has long been used in the recording industry , which is nothing more than adding noise, although now the noise is going through the stage of noise shaping - i.e. the frequencies most audible to the human ear are removed from it.

Adding enough white noise to be heard clearly did not help the audio load. This method is not suitable for us, because if the noise can be heard, then we can assume that the audio recording is damaged and cannot be listened to =(

3. Working with track dynamics

After processing the entire track with a compressor with fairly “soft” settings, the audio recording was successfully loaded. Here is a screenshot of the compressor settings:

It is quite problematic for an unprepared listener to hear the difference with the original, but if you listen with headphones or on low-quality acoustics, it is impossible.

"Crown" method

But this method surprised me with its simplicity, while it turned out to be the highest quality of all those discussed earlier. You just need to add a small piece of an arbitrary signal to the end of the track (after the music has ended). As a result, the useful signal does not change in any way, but the VKontakte website does not try to block such tracks. Specifically in this example, I added a 440 hertz sine wave to the end of the piece, the duration of the noise is approximately 1 minute.

If this article is of interest to readers, then I can take a closer look at each of the methods of downloading music (I guess that the “crown” method will soon be “covered”), depending on the material (classical, rock, pop, electronics). Each of the options will work better on one material and worse on another, that is, in some places it is more noticeable to a person, and in others practically without changing the source.

The article turned out to be not as complete as I would like, for the reason that my DAW refused to work and began to throw an error (so I did all the work in Audacity). I guess there are a few other ways that will work:

1. Working with the stereo base (its expansion/constriction)
2. Multi-band processing of the entire track
3. Multiband compression of the mid-frequency range, to a much lesser extent than discussed in the article.
4. Adding very weak signal reverberation inaudible to the human ear.
5. , both single- and multi-band.
If there is an opportunity to work on a powerful DAW, then I will be able to consider these cases.