The Universal Category System (UCS)
“The goal of the UCS is to stabilize and unify a standard category system for the classification of sound effects. It aims to establish a common CategoryID (CatID) for each of these categories in the hopes of making organization and portability of sound files more uniform and convenient.” -Tim Nielsen, Founder of the UCS
The Universal Category System is a newly proposed methodology for naming audio files to facilitate the management of the beautiful, but often unwieldy audio libraries that many sound designers have come to accumulate. The system itself is rather straight forward, breaking down most things one could feasibly record or otherwise produce sound with into a set of discrete and fixed categories. As you are well aware, many things make noise; and thus there are many categories/subcategories (657 at the time of writing this). To help facilitate the smooth adoption of this system Universally, from film to game audio to field recording to sound libraries, a number of tools are being developed by community members. I wrote this tool to help seamlessly integrate the UCS with a wide variety of workflows in the audio workstation Reaper.
The UCS Reaper Renaming Tool (right) in action, renaming items and tracks in Reaper (left).
Reaper Web Interfaces
ReaScript offers a way for Reaper users to write custom code that makes use of Reaper’s built-in functions for processing and managing audio (via the Reaper API). Most ReaScripting is done in the programming language Lua, which I’ve discussed previously as a quick way to tweak, combine, and batch process core features in Reaper. However, ReaScripting in Lua is somewhat limited in that graphic user interfaces, while feasible, are pretty tricky to implement. It would be similarly difficult to, say, pull data from an active Google Sheet containing the latest information on the UCS everytime the user loads the tool.
Reaper Web Interfaces can resolve these issues, among many others, by allowing the user to host a webpage in their browser that communicates and triggers actions directly in the active Reaper session. Web Interfaces are built using HTML files with Javascript and CSS, an environment that web developers may be more acquainted with. While I wouldn’t venture to call myself a web developer, there is a plethora of information available to streamline the web development process. Thus, I built this tool to take advantage of the pros in both Web Interfaces and conventional Reascript by:
Giving the user a clean, responsive interface for building file names in line with the UCS standards
Triggering a custom ReaScript to write those names to appropriate items, tracks, regions, and/or markers in the active Reaper project
Installation
UPDATED 2025-09-10
This section used to have a handy YouTube video on installing and using the UCS Renaming Tool. However, that video was posted on a business Google/YouTube account that I no longer pay to maintain.
For up-to-date installation instructions, please refer to my GitHub Wiki page below:
https://github.com/acendan/reascripts/wiki/UCS-Renaming-Tool
The REAPER Blog
This tool was featured on The REAPER Blog! Check out the episode here:
Officially Part of the UCS Resources!
This tool has been recognized and included for public distribution in the official UCS utilities/resources. This blog post has been converted to a PDF to help new users get set up with it. You can check it out in the UCS Google Drive or download the PDF here if you’d like to distribute it yourself!