The Importance of Naming Conventions

There is one thing I hate.

Well, actually, that's not true. There are many things I hate. Y'know, injustice, having to pay the bills, sexism... I hate many things. But when it comes to sound design, there is one thing I hate.

Actually that isn't true either. There are quite a few things that can happen when you do audio design for games that can seriously piss me off. Many of these issues will be brought up in this blog at one time or another. You know, at the end of the day I still absolutely love my work, but there are things that will make you grind your teeth.

Today I will talk about one of those things.

You know when you've been out on the field recording sound effects all day? You've been gathering footstep sounds, wind howling, various amounts of water noises... the works. Hooray, right? Yeah! Time to go home and edit these sons o' bitchnazzes! Or maybe I'll do it tomorrow because man, am I tired after all those hours of recording. I'll just put them on the HD real quick and leave them there. I'll remember what I did tomorrow.

*8 or so hours later*

"Wait, what? What's that?! It sounds like an alien being dragged backwards through a blowdryer!"

...

Well, that isn't the part I hate. That's actually part of the norm (at least for me) and something I rather enjoy (again, at least for me). I sort of like not knowing what the hell I just recorded because that makes it easier to write a nice naming convention. In a year or so, future Fredrik won't be interested in what past Fredrik recorded so much as what those recordings actually sound like. The keywords need to be consistent, they need to work according to my own complex (and often strange) abstraction layer so that they accurately tell me what the sound sounds like rather than what it actually is.

What I hate is when I get sounds from other places and their naming convention is just not even remotely close to what I want. I basically have to go through the entire library, renaming each and every entry and making sure everything makes sense to me. Honestly, this is why I prefer to record my own sounds, categorizing them the way I want them. Even recording together with someone else can be a pain if I'm not the one to edit the audio because it'll simply never end up the way I want them to.

Of course, the easy way around this is to work with someone who speaks the same language as you. Or, you know, actually try to adapt to other people's workflow.

Actually, come to think of it, I don't actually hate this. I sort of see it as a fun challenge that needs to be overcome.

Aw, shucks. I just invalidated the entire premise for this post, didn't I. Um...

Have a fun picture!

New Computer IV: Revenge of the iLok

Ah, yes. The wonders of music software.

I remember way back when this was all very simple. You had a computer with a SoundBlaster 16 in it (32 if you were lucky) and a generic MIDI editing piece of software that let you do the basic stuff (y'know, piano roll, staff view... those things). You clicked somewhere and a note ended up where you clicked. You pressed play and - voilà - you suddenly heard something coming out of your speakers. Nothing was complicated; it was all MIDI, filtered through whatever your sound card was capable of.

These days... things are just a bit more complicated.

I've spent most of today trying to install two synths using the completely useless and utterly terrible PLAY engine (seriously, PLAY should be burned and sealed away forever so that it can't taint future generations of VST systems): Stormdrum 2 and EWQL Symphonic Choirs. See, the problem was that the installer .exe on both of the install CD:s didn't work. It just did not work. Either it launched, installed absolutely nothing worth 0 kb of HD space (Stormdrum 2) or it started installing and then failed due to a "fatal error" (Symphonic Choirs).

Wonderful.

I contaced the Soundsonline support and they told me to basically skip the whole installation and instead grab a software update from their site and then copy the library folders manually onto my HD. Well, sure. I did so for SD2 and then launched Cubase (which, by the way, will only start if there's an eLicenser plugged into one of my USB ports). I added the PLAY VST, saw that the SD2 library was added as a favourite and was pleasantly surprised. Then I tried to load an instrument. Eeerrrk. (That was the sound of a failure alarm going off.)

Nah, because you see, my product wasn't authorized. Never mind that the iLok - the other kind of USB dongle you need for your stuff - was plugged in, recognized by Windows and everything. Nuh-uh. It wasn't authorized. So I logged in at iLok.com (because iLok insists on doing this through an ActiveX plugin from their site instead of using a piece of software for no discernible reason) and it told me I didn't have an iLok plugged in. I did. I do. Arrrghhh.

I then tried to plug the iLok into basically every USB port available until I found one where Stormdrum2 didn't complain anymore. Satisfied - sort of - I moved on to Symphonic Choirs, thinking it would be the same thing there. Hahaha! Silly me. Nah, after copying six DVD:s worth of samples I tried to load them up and got a completely different error: "Invalid Product ID". Apparently something else was wrong now and I had no idea what.

This is where we currently are. I have emailed Soundsonline and asked them what the flying hell is wrong (in a nice and polite way) and now all I can do is wait. I'm just happy my entire project isn't completely dependent on that particular library.

Today's lesson: Buy things that use Kontakt and nothing bloody else.