The Universal Category System (UCS)
“The goal of the UCS is to stabilize and unify a standard category system for the classification of sound effects. It aims to establish a common CategoryID (CatID) for each of these categories in the hopes of making organization and portability of sound files more uniform and convenient.” -Tim Nielsen, Founder of the UCS
The Universal Category System is a newly proposed methodology for naming audio files to facilitate the management of the beautiful, but often unwieldy audio libraries that many sound designers have come to accumulate. The system itself is rather straight forward, breaking down most things one could feasibly record or otherwise produce sound with into a set of discrete and fixed categories. As you are well aware, many things make noise; and thus there are many categories/subcategories (657 at the time of writing this). To help facilitate the smooth adoption of this system Universally, from film to game audio to field recording to sound libraries, a number of tools are being developed by community members. I wrote this tool to help seamlessly integrate the UCS with a wide variety of workflows in the audio workstation Reaper.
The UCS Reaper Renaming Tool (right) in action, renaming items and tracks in Reaper (left).
Reaper Web Interfaces
ReaScript offers a way for Reaper users to write custom code that makes use of Reaper’s built-in functions for processing and managing audio (via the Reaper API). Most ReaScripting is done in the programming language Lua, which I’ve discussed previously as a quick way to tweak, combine, and batch process core features in Reaper. However, ReaScripting in Lua is somewhat limited in that graphic user interfaces, while feasible, are pretty tricky to implement. It would be similarly difficult to, say, pull data from an active Google Sheet containing the latest information on the UCS everytime the user loads the tool.
Reaper Web Interfaces can resolve these issues, among many others, by allowing the user to host a webpage in their browser that communicates and triggers actions directly in the active Reaper session. Web Interfaces are built using HTML files with Javascript and CSS, an environment that web developers may be more acquainted with. While I wouldn’t venture to call myself a web developer, there is a plethora of information available to streamline the web development process. Thus, I built this tool to take advantage of the pros in both Web Interfaces and conventional Reascript by:
Giving the user a clean, responsive interface for building file names in line with the UCS standards
Triggering a custom ReaScript to write those names to appropriate items, tracks, regions, and/or markers in the active Reaper project
Overview and Installation
Rather than dive into the weeds on how the tool works, I recommend watching this brief video on getting started. It should take you from installation to actively editing a session in just over five minutes. Thanks for checking it out and if you have any questions or ideas for improving the tool to match your workflow, let me know in the comments section of this post or through the contact form above!
Setup Troubleshooting
1. If you can access the tool in your web browser, but nothing changes when you press Submit, then go to Extensions > ReaPack > Browse Packages and type in “UCS Renaming Tool”. You should see three scripts. Make sure that all of them are installed! If you do not have them installed, then right click on each and select Install.
2. Did you previously use the dark mode version of the tool, then update, and now it no longer works? Go to Options > Preferences > Control/OSC/Web and click on the web browser interface that you’ve set the UCS tool up with. Click the edit button, then in the settings window that pops up, set the “Default Interface” to “acendan_UCS Renaming Tool.html”. Everything should now be good to go! To enable dark mode again, open the UCS tool in your browser, click the settings button in the upper right, then enable dark mode.
3. Are you getting an error message requiring that you install the JS_ReaScript API but are unable to find it in ReaPack? Try going to Extensions > ReaPack > Import Repositories… and pasting this link directly into the dialog box that appears!
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ReaTeam/Extensions/master/index.xml
4. If you run into any other notable issues, the first thing I recommend trying is syncing latest in ReaPack. To do so, go to Extensions > ReaPack > Synchronize Packages. If that doesn’t fix it, then please reach out to me!
Updates
June 2021 - Metadata Update
This version of the UCS Renaming Tool introduces metadata embedding functionality! Also includes some updates to language support and a fully revamped preset management system. Check it out below:
The REAPER Blog
This tool was featured on The REAPER Blog! Check out the episode here:
September 2020 Update
- Support for 13 languages
- Custom user presets
- Interactive data table rows
- Contextual wildcard support
- Utilizing Reaper’s native marker/region manager
- Accessing the interface directly from Reaper
Officially Part of the UCS Resources!
This tool has been recognized and included for public distribution in the official UCS utilities/resources. This blog post has been converted to a PDF to help new users get set up with it. You can check it out in the UCS Google Drive or download the PDF here if you’d like to distribute it yourself!