Naming Conventions

Unzipping each pack will give you a folder with specific structure.

Pack folder

Pack folder is named like this OAP001_Pack Name :

  • OAP : Short for "Official Ambience Pack". When you release your own packs, you can use any other initials of any number of characters. Just don't use any digits because they are following next.
  • 001 : Increasing serial number each time a new pack is released. Leading zeroes is not required but I think in some situation like lists it is neater.
  • Pack Name : A full name. Can use spaces, but not underscore. They are usually packaged per recording location, so it is easier to imagine the content inside if you can picture that location.

Folder structure

Inside pack folder contains 4 sub-folders and 1 file :

OAP006_Night Temple/
├── Clips/
│   ├── AMBForst-Night_CL-Forest Shimmer Frog Irregular_TiAm_OAP006_ANMLInsect.wav
│   ├── AMBForst-Night_CL-Forest Shimmer Frog Pulsing_TiAm_OAP006_ANMLInsect.wav
│   └── ...
├── Images~/
│   ├── Image1.jpg
│   ├── Image2.jpg
│   └── ...
└── package.json
  • Clips : Store .wav files which would become AudioClip in Unity.
  • Images~ : An optional unimporting folder for Unity because it ends with ~. Put image files in here where you recorded the sound so it helps picture the location later on. By having a convention for this, front end web interface to download packs can scan for images to display as a visual preview of the sound when someone wants to roughly scans by sight for suitable ambiences.
  • package.json : This is a file which is the metadata of this pack. It can contain full name and description along with author/audio engineers involved. See package.json section.

Universal Category System (UCS)

I highly recommend you to learn about Universal Category System (UCS). It is an initiative by a group of audio engineers to assign a single CatID to any sounds in the world. There are more than 600+ CatID available and they hope those could cover most sounds. For an initiative to work, they need adopters. I think we should join them!

An idea is that each CatID can be exploded into a category and subcategory, and also synonyms in different languages. Making the task of determining just the right CatID tags a bunch of useful metadata for your audio automatically. Determining CatID quickly is something you need to master from now on by skimming through available categories and sub-categories.

File naming

Inside Clips, everything are named according to Universal Category System (UCS) file name convention. It encourages that all the metadata are also bunched up in the file name, in addition to specific metadata field inside the file.

CatID-UserCategory_VendorCategory-FXName_CreatorID_SourceID_UserData
  • CatID : One of 600+ available UCS category IDs, a permutation of category and subcategory. You maybe troubled by having to choose only one while your ambience contains various stuff inside, in which you likely arrive at AMB___ category. We fix this problem in the UserData field.
  • UserCategory : We augments the standardized CatID from UCS. See User Category section.
  • VendorCategory : Similar to UserCategory but this is not related to the audio content, but related to usage inside Tiny Ambience. See Vendor Category section.
  • FXName : Descriptive name. UCS allows using spaces, because dashes and underscores are used for syntactic purpose already.
  • CreatorID : This is always "TiAm", which stands for Tiny Ambience.
  • SourceID : The pack code name that contains this clip.
  • UserData : This is a freeform area, just that you can't use _ inside. If the main CatID arrives at AMB___ it may undermine interesting content inside that location. I would like the content inside the ambience to be searchable as well. You can put as many CatID here as you like separated by spaces. You can use this even if the main CatID isn't AMB___.

User Category

User Category can add a bit more information that none of CatID cover. These are Tiny Ambience specific and you can put in multiple separated by spaces. You will notice that these tags can exist at the same time as the official CatID.

Currently there is only time, since CatID do not care about time of recording. (Time of recording highly suggests a specific sound for nature ambiences.)

UserCategory Description
(Nothing) Suggests that time of day does not matter much for this recording, or it is Day but was not tagged.
Dawn Rare, but some sounds may only be available at dawn.
Day Daytime recording is often implied. But it is a good idea to explicitly tag it so we can differentiate from recordings where time of day does not matter.
Dusk Transition period from day to night. Use when you think recording sooner or later would get different sounds.
Night When it is dark until the next morning.

If it is lightly raining but you don't want to use the CatID, put it in User Data instead. Use this only for time which CatID doesn't cover.

Vendor Category

Only CL and CS are used here. C stands for clips.

CL : Loopable clips

The clip has guarantee that it could loop seamlessly on its own, and is usually longer than one-shots but not more than 10s on average. Background noises are usually kept intact except the very low end, since the point of them are to provide a sense of location.

Therefore when you are finding something for use in Looping Clip layer mode, these clips are perfect.

It is also possible to use these in Timeline mode leveraging the loop checkbox in the clip. (It is very useful that you can extend the clip to fill the void as long as you like.) Make sure it doesn't touch the edge of timeline because timeline as a whole can't loop seamlessly. Instead, fade out the edge after several loops.

If it is CLI, I stands for "Isolated". It is still meant to loop seamlessly, but audio is processed heavily to remove unrelated element. These audio sounds bad and incomplete on their own, they are for stacking up over other CL clips while adding minimal volume contribution across the frequency spectrum.

CS : One-shot clips

These clips are usually short and has no looping guarantee. They are designed to be used with One Shot Program layer mode.

Audio content may be heavily processed (EQ, De-noise, etc.) to make the shot as clean as possible thus allow them to be overlayed onto variety of locations. This may make the clip sounds synthetic when listening to them alone. They will also have fade in and fade out at the edges to help make the shot a bit smoother.

Spamming these too often likely sounds bad, but sporadically will spice up your ambience. Also likely the volume needs to be very low and requires an another running Looping Clip layer to drown out the background noise that is remaining in the clip. (It is impossible to get a sparkling clean shots, unless I captured the bird and record it in the laboratory...)

Of course, you can also use these clips in Timeline mode.

User Data

UCS allows this to be anything. I decided to put in as many more CatID that are component inside the ambience. It is a shame when I think the main CatID should be AMBPark, but it has birds and is lightly raining. I can put the other ones in here instead. They are separated by spaces.

.wav file metadata / tags

Just the file name in UCS can grant enough information, but I recommend you write Comment tag in the .wav file. It is the only appropriate place to be wordy about your file, describe your impression, saving you from being confused a year later when you want to reuse some files.

Other than Comment, you can put in Artist and Album as the pack's code name.

I think we should not copy the file name onto Title metadata, because when we rename the file (which conforms to UCS) we would also need to update the Title. Sounds like it would be annoying to manage, let's keep the Title blank so many softwares would fall back to file name.