Have you heard about the Universal Category System (UCS)? It’s a wonderful metadata initiative spearheaded by Tim Nielsen, Justin Drury, & Kai Paquin with the collaboration of sound effects librarians, vendors, and designers around the globe.
If you can’t tell by the name, the main goal of UCS is to provide a consistent framework for categorization of sound effects. The category and subcategory fields are incredibly useful when used correctly, and this initiative provides a universal standard for them. Imagine a world where any library you purchase fits right into the categorization system of your database, no additional work required. If you adopt UCS and purchase libraries that are UCS compliant, that can be a reality!
The big announcement here is this: All Collected Transients sound effects libraries now conform to the UCS standard. (Even the past free ones!) When you download something from Collected Transients, you now have the added advantages that UCS brings.
Along with this UCS update, various other metadata has been updated and improved. To give some examples: Microphone information fields have been standardized. The location field is now formatted in a way which Soundminer will be able to parse by Country, State, & City. A few spelling mistakes have also been fixed 😉
Update Past Purchases to UCS
If you’ve purchased any Collected Transients library in the past, we want to make sure you can adapt them to this new standard and get metadata updates if you choose to. To do that, there are a few options:
If you own the latest Soundminer:
Justin Drury at Soundminer has made integrating the UCS system incredibly easy. The latest builds of Soundminer on Mac and PC have the Universal Category System baked in. Furthermore, there is a new “cloud” metadata system that makes updating metadata a breeze. If you’re running Soundminer v5 or Soundminer Plus 5.0, all you have to do is highlight the Collected Transients files you’d like to update and click Lookup Metadata From Cloud in the Database menu. Soundminer will pull the new UCS metadata from the cloud and update your database automatically! Be sure the Manufacturer field is labeled “Collected Transients”. All libraries come with that field filled correctly, but if you’ve changed it, you’ll have to switch it back for the metadata update to work.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This will only work if you’re using the highest sample rate files as they were provided to you. If you’ve converted, edited, or are using a lower sample rate versions, Soundminer will not be able to match the files to perform this “cloud” metadata update. Proper sample rates are listed below:
- We Are the People – 48kHz
- Machine Emanation – 192kHz
- rOtation – 192kHz
- Diffuse City – 96kHz
- Thermal Flux – 192kHz
- Combustion – 192kHz
- Implosion – 192kHz
- Ice in a Vice – 192kHz
- FUBARED – 96kHz
- The Flusher – 48kHz
- This Library Sucks – 192kHz
If you own an older Soundminer or utilize other database software:
I have prepared .csv/.tsv files with all of the proper UCS metadata for each Collected Transients sound effects library. Depending on your software, you can typically just import these .csv/.tsv files to update the metadata. There are far too many storage systems, software options, and software versions for me to provide detailed support for this, but if you’re handy with a spreadsheet, the .csv/.tsv files have all the information you need to make them work just about anywhere.
If you just want to download new files:
I get it! Sometimes just deleting the old and importing the new makes the most sense! For past customers that want to download new files, simply fill out the form below to request new downloads and we’ll be in touch. File delivery, however, is not free. Every time a file is downloaded, Collected Transients pays for data transfer, and those fees can add up! To offset some of this cost, a $1.00 fee is required. This fee will allow you to redownload all of your past purchases with updated metadata.
Other Library Updates
Apart from updating metadata, Collected Transients has also made editing/mixing improvements to some libraries. To take advantage of these improvements, you’ll need to request new download links (see above).
Thermal Flux
This library received the biggest update by far. In it’s initial release, Thermal Flux provided separate individual mics for many of it’s sound effects. Since it’s release, Collected Transients has adopted a new approach of only providing separate mics if they truly bring extra usefulness and versatility to a library. It’s our opinion that for Thermal Flux, these separate individual mic options were not necessary. To update this library, each of these multi-mic sound effects was either mixed together to form one improved sound effect, or a decision was made to only include the most useful mic option.
Thermal Flux also exclusively took the “One file per Sound Effect” route. Newer libraries from Collected Transients use a “Multi-Take File” approach. This means that very similar sound effects are grouped together and spaced apart in one single file. For example, rather than having 10 similar whooshes as individual files, a multi-take file would take those 10 whooshes and space them apart in one file. We feel this approach makes more sense for a new and improved Thermal Flux, so we’ve done just that with many of the sound effects in the library.
rOtation
rOtation had a very small update to take one set of five sound effects and combine them in a multi-take file.
FUBARED/Ice in a Vice
Though these free libraries are no longer available to new customers, they still received some TLC to improve them. Both libraries now make use of multi-take files.
Pretty New Stuff!
The website has gone through a ton of subtle and not so subtle improvements over the past couple months. Artwork has been updated to a brand new look. Copy has been improved. Images and code have been optimized for a snappier experience. We’ve even taken the “www” off the URL! Who needs those anyways? There’s even a new Ultrasonic Demo Page you can play with to test out the advantage of high sample rates!
If you haven’t visited in a while, go ahead and look around the flashy new and improved site. 😀