axk wrote:
...is it worth being a little more comprehensive with our descriptions on the metadata? Purely for the reason that this is a crowd sourced library from all over the world, so being quite granular with description is not such a bad thing (as the whole point of this is to collect as many weird and wonderful crowds from all over the world).
Absolutely! There's a balance to be had between not enough and too much info, of course. Every editor uses a different workflow, search terminology, and sound design process. For our own personal purposes, obviously you'd taylor things to your own style. For general libraries, however, there are certainly bits of info that are more useful to include than others.
samueljustice wrote:
For example my naming for the files is simple and follows the guidelines -
CROWD_Zoo_ENGLAND_UK_Penguin_Exhibit_EXT
This is a great example. If I were to sort a bunch of files with this naming convention alphabetically, they'd line up according to:
Library
Specific Location
Broad Location
Short Description
Interior/Exterior
The only thing I'd say is that it might be worthwhile to put the "Penguin_Exhibit" tag before the "ENGLAND_UK" tag, since people will usually be concerned with the description first, then the broad location (in most instances, at least).
samueljustice wrote:
Then for the metadata I have put the following -
Audible Worlds Crowd Walla - Top of Penguin Exhibit Hilltop. Facing down to crowd with children. Water fountain heard - Marwell Zoo UK England - Samuel Justice - SONY M10 - 20140731
One thing I've been trying to advocate more is the use of pipes instead of hyphens in metadata. Putting "||" between sections instead of "-" makes things a little more modern/clean-looking to me, translates fine in all the DAWs I've tried it in up to this point, and frees up hyphens to be used in other ways. Definitely a matter of personal taste, but I find myself replacing every hyphen with pipes in the Uni library here.
Soundminer has specific fields for library, mic, location, recordist, and date, so I'd only include those in the Description field if you didn't have access to that piece of software. Also, instead of "Water fountain heard", I might but "Gentle water fountain in background" or something along those lines. I assume I'll be hearing anything that makes it into the description, so no need to specify!
Thanks again for all the great info Alex, the pipe solution actually makes a lot of sense. Hyphens can definitely only go so far!