If you share a sound library with a team, organization is key. When everyone can access the sounds they need, the work goes quicker and everyone can focus on the creative aspects of their job. Whether you’re a sound designer, video editor, game programmer, or anyone else who works with sound effects, this blog will help you organize your team’s library for maximum efficiency.
When your library is organized and easy to navigate, you’ll find that everything else becomes a little easier. Here are some of the main benefits of a well-organized library:
The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s much faster to navigate and search a well-organized library. Instead of clicking through folders and sub-folders to find where your colleague saved a specific sound five years ago, you’ll be able to locate anything in your collection with a quick keyword search.
If time is money, then a well-organized library translates directly into lower overhead costs. The less time your team spends hunting for sounds, the quicker projects can get done, saving you or your clients money. An organized library also makes it easier to onboard new team members and collaborate with clients and freelancers.
When it’s easy to find the sounds you need, you can turn your focus back to the important part: using those sounds. A well-organized library keeps your mind focused on the task at hand, giving your team more time to devote to creative thinking and freeing them up to do their best work.
Convinced yet? Good. Now, it’s time to put your plan into action. Follow these steps to organize your library for maximum efficiency and usefulness, and you’ll be on your way to a smoother workflow, better results, and a happier team.
First, you’ll need to take stock of your assets and how they’re currently organized. If you’ve purchased libraries from multiple sources, they probably use different folder structures and file naming conventions. And, if your collection includes original material such as field recordings, it may or may not be clear what’s what. Now is the time to clean up your collection, including identifying unlabelled files and folders, deleting any redundant copies, and flagging anything that might be an issue during the next step.
Now it’s time for the real work of organizing your library. This task might seem daunting, so it helps to break up the process into a few different stages. The first step is to divide your collection into high-level categories such as purchased libraries, original recordings, and music (if applicable).
Within each of those top-level groups, create folders to classify your sounds. We recommend using the Universal Category System (UCS) used by PSE and many other distributors to sort your sounds into common categories like Animals, Vehicles, or Walla. You can then create nested folders for UCS subcategories such as Birds, Dogs, and Insects.
Finally, implement a consistent file naming scheme to make your collection searchable (again, we recommend UCS). This can be done relatively quickly by using a batch file editor to add UCS prefixes to all file names, such as VEHCar_ for cars, VEHMoto_ for motorcycles, VEHMil_ for military vehicles, and so on. You can then add additional keywords for better searchability.
When you’ve got your library nice and organized, it’s time to show your team how to use it. Start by holding a meeting or recording a video to walk everyone through the new system. Then, create a shared document that all users can reference in the future. It’s important to get off to a good start, so be sure to take this time to solicit questions or feedback from your team.
At this point, the new system has hopefully made a positive impact on your workflow. But as your library continues to grow, you’ll need to stay on top of organization to ensure everything keeps running smoothly. When you buy libraries, look for ones that are UCS-compliant, such as Pro Sound Effects products. These will be easiest to integrate into your collection.
When ingesting original files such as field recordings or custom-designed sound effects, establish a workflow that includes giving every asset a standardized file name and moving them to the correct folders immediately. As long as you keep up these habits, your library will always be organized and easy to search.
SoundQ is Pro Sound Effects’ free library management software. SoundQ allows you to easily search and filter sounds from your personal collection, PSE's cloud library, and CC0 assets from Freesound—individually or all at once. SoundQ also gives you the tools to manage access for your team, create shared Collections, edit metadata, trim and process sounds, and quickly insert files right onto your project timeline.
To see everything SoundQ has to offer, check out the SoundQ User Guide or join the PSE Slack community for updates and support. If you’re interested in a custom plan tailored to your organization’s needs, check out our Teams page for a free trial, or contact our licensing specialists to discuss your unique needs.
Pro Sound Effects and many other distributors use UCS to give each file a standardized prefix that instantly tells you which category and subcategory it’s part of. If your whole library is UCS-compliant, you can easily find any type of sound effect with a quick search.
Start implementing UCS in your library with these helpful documents:
Apps like Advanced Renamer, Easy File Renamer, and the macOS Rename tool make it easy to rename files and folders in batches or individually. This means you can easily add UCS prefixes to all of your files, as well as descriptive keywords and other helpful information like recording locations, microphones used, or multichannel formats.
Many of these apps include special “rules” to find and replace text, add incremental numbers to batches of files, convert uppercase to lowercase, and more. Once your files are named appropriately, use SoundQ’s robust tools to quickly batch-edit metadata.
Organizing your library is crucial, but it’s just one element of an efficient team workflow. For more wisdom, check out our blogs and videos to learn more about SoundQ, empower your team with a PSE Teams Plan, and more.