Tim Nielsen releases the final version of the Universal Category System for sound effects:

Renowned sound supervisor and sound designer Tim Nielsen and the team behind the Universal Category System (UCS) have just released UCS version 8.2, billed as the final version. Read Tim's full statement about it below - and if you're creating sound effects libraries, I strongly encourage you to follow the UCS conventions as this is a powerful, standardized metadata system.

And a personal thanks from me to Tim and the team for the monumental task of creating UCS in the first place - it's making a massive difference for independent sound creators as well as people who're using sound effects and metadata across the world every day. Thanks for this huge contribution to the sound community!

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Download the full UCS 8.2 package here (634 MB – updated February 2nd 2023)

Find Sound Effects Libraries that follow the UCS format

 
Hello everyone! I hope this finds you happy and healthy.

Today I’m releasing UCS 8.2. I want to go over some things related to the release in this email.
Most importantly, for several reasons, this is the FINAL planned update to the category list.

I understand that it is disruptive every time an update is made. Each update introduces new Subcategories, affecting everyone who may have already spent much time updating their libraries to 8.0 or 8.1. I fear additional updates beyond this one will have a detrimental effect on the system’s adoption.

Also, the list itself seems finally ‘self-sufficient.’ I know it will never be perfect; there will always be people who want this and want that. But when we released 8.0, we knew that the list would have to get out into the wild and that it would only be when people started using it that we saw the deficiencies. We always knew it would need updating. But I’m happy now with 8.2 that the list really ‘works,’ even with any flaws that we know are still there. It’s functional, and that’s all it was ever meant to be. It’s time to lock off the list.

And lastly, I cannot devote any more time to this project. When I had the idea to revisit this project at the beginning of Covid, I had yet to learn it would take as much time as it has. Months of my life have now been spent (along with the great time of many others) on UCS. It’s time for ME to move on as well.

With all that said, UCS 8.2 is the final release of the system planned. New tools that use the list may emerge, but the list itself won’t receive any more updates.

If you are a Soundminer user, if the new list doesn’t automatically update for you, please open the UCS Tagger window, and under the three bars, select ‘Download latest Universal Category List.’ The new builds of V6 Beta should update this automatically. But V5 will not, so please update it manually.
A straightforward way to check that you have the 8.2 list is to look for AMBIENCE-FANTASY; it’s one of the new Subcategories. If you see that, you have the 8.2 list loaded.

UCS 8.2 adds 71 new Subcategories, although many repeat across the various categories. Just like the 8.1 release, there are no new Top Level categories.

All tools, folder lists, and Keyboard Maestro macros have now been updated to version 8.2 (get the full package here). As always you can find links to the Slack group, YouTube Channel, and Facebook groups there as well.

www.universalcategorysystem.com

The 8.2 list also includes a Korean translation for the first time, and at some point in the future, we will add Hindi, which will be the last of the planned translations, and bring the total number of translations to 20!

Please see the following link for an overview of what is new in the 8.2 release:

Last year I did a virtual presentation for the Sound Girls conference in LA. This turned out to be the best single ‘overview’ video of UCS, so I’ve posted this at the top of the YouTube channel next to the 8.2 update video.

For anyone interested in watching or sharing a single overview of the whole idea of UCS, this is probably the best thing at the moment:

Some people had asked for a single ‘overview’ type sheet of the whole system. I have now done that, it’s a high-resolution PDF, and it’s available in two slightly different aspect ratios. It could be used as a desktop image or printed into a poster or something. You can find it on the top level of the UCS folder for anyone who might like to use it.

This system could not have come to life without the help of a great many people, and while I’m sure I will miss a few, I need to try and thank everyone here:

First to Justin Drury at Soundminer. He is always up for a crazy idea; he was the one who hosted ver 1.0 of this list many years ago on the Soundminer website. And he helped figure out how someone could ‘use’ this list daily. I can’t thank Justin enough for putting up with my ideas and even sometimes embracing them! Other sound database software may have followed suit, but Soundminer embraced UCS from the beginning and still has its most robust and powerful implementation. Thank you!

To Kai Pacquin, who helped develop the keyboard Maestro macros and spent the most time with me refining the list and what it could do. And to his father for Audio Category Clipper, the best helper program for someone new to the system.
To the brain trust who spent hours on zoom meetings helping us hash out the list itself: Andrew Quinn, Andy Martin, Arnoud Traa, Cédric Chatty, Chris Battaglia, Jeff Davis, Justin M. Davey, Michal Fojcik, Mikkel Nielsen, Paul Poduska, Roy Waldspurger, Théo Terror, Tim Farrell, and Tristan Horton.

To Andrew Moore for UCS File Renamer, Aaron Cendan for his excellent Reaper tools for UCS, and Michael Pierluissi and Mark Winter for the Renamer tools.

And to the people around the world who helped craft the various translated versions of the list: Oscar Rydelious, Gray Haugholt, Are Teashkin, Vitali Zavadskyy, Alvaro de Iscar, Andrii Voloschuk, Gustav Landerholm, Daniel Djuric, Colin Walder, Mikkel Nielsen, Michal Fojcik, Barbara Kapica, Arseny Tishkin, Mehmet Aksoy, Derrick Espino, Giel van Geloven, Arnoud Traa, Frank Kruse, Bo Li, Jamie Lee, Deb Dourneau, Alan Zili, Sami Kiosk, Katrine Amsler, Simone Micheli, Aline Brujins, and Prashant Mishra, Muyan Pei, JingDong Yue, Yang Ding, Suty Shen, Eddy Liu, Xingyu Liu

And to Prashant Mishra for building and maintaining the UCS home page.

I’m excited to release this final update and relieved to be able to move on a bit from it. UCS has been widely adopted, and I’m happy that people find it helpful. With the seeds of this more than eight years ago, that’s all I ever intended to try and craft something useful.

I wish you all the best!

Tim