Associating data with your finished sound effects products is the final step before submitting your material to sound distributors. This data, called metadata, offers interested buyers information on each sound in your library. Details about the seven main types of metadata to be used when cataloging your sound effects follow.
Initially you want to pick the right format for listing your metadata. I have found that .xls projects and the most requested format for metadata which assign each sound a row and each category a column. This type of document, as opposed to a text file, will let you search your sounds easily in the future according to each characteristic.
1. Broad categories should be used for the first Main Category column such as Animals, Machinery, and Vehicles. Be as minimal as possible in picking the main categories for maximum simplicity and organization.
3. The next main type of metadata, the Sub-Category, is intended to splice up each main category more specifically such as Tools: Hammers, Tools:Saws, Tools:Screwdrivers.
3. If you associate a SKU number of three letters unique to you, such as your initials, and five digits such as SFX00001_DogBark with each sound effect upon their creation your sounds will be perfectly organized. The sound to follow the above example would begin with SFX00002 and so on which assigns a totally unique identity to each sound. This numbering system alleviates confusion in the future should you have multiple Dog Barks and only organize them alphabetically.
4. A friendly title for Title is simply intended to inform the buyer on the type of sound like Bird Chirp 1.
5. A simple but significant bit of metadata is Time Length since long sound effects are usually priced higher than shorter sound effects and the buyer deserves to know how much sound they are getting for their money.
6. Information under Track Info can be written, for example, as 48k 16bit Mono .wav which specifies the quality of each sample by providing the sample rate, bit rate, mono/stereo info, and file type.
7. One of the main ways that clients find your sounds will be by searching for keywords and thus your Keyword category is very important. Plurals of the sound, related sounds, phrases that include the sound, and misspellings can all help your sounds be found such as car, cars, vehicle, vehicles, car driving, driving a car, kar, kars.
The next step after cataloging your sounds according to the above seven steps is submission to online distributors for sale of licensing rights.