Strata Help

A REAPER project file with an .rpp extension. In this document, “project” refers to the main project of a Strata collection.

A REAPER project file that is part of a collection of REAPER projects that are referenced in a main REAPER project. They are all located in the subproject folder under the main project folder. Each subproject has a corresponding folder.

A set of 16 custom colors that are used in a consistent manner across the libraries.

One or more tracks in REAPER that constitute layers of a designed sound.

In a track, you can control the audio media items placed on it on the timeline. All tracks have names and colors that represent their media items and layers.

Media items reference source media files. One or more media items can reference a single source media file.

Audio files in the Broadcast Wave format, with .wav file extensions. In REAPER projects, they are referenced by one or more media items. All source files in the Strata collections use the Universal Category System naming convention and contain relevant embedded metadata.

The Media folder is located within the subproject folder and contains all source media files.

A designated period of time that is represented in the REAPER region list and main window. Regions are assigned to render specific track outputs, and you can select and render them to audio files as explained in Rendering Audio Files.

In Strata, regions also contain information for “Render to file” settings and project render metadata. In this case, the region name is a text string that contains the data to which various REAPER wildcard values are set. These regions are always black.

Visual identifiers that signify the start of a set of sounds associated with one or more layers.

Files rendered from their relative subprojects to destination Rendered folders in the relative subproject folders. These files are then referenced as media items in the main project to audition selected content. The rendered media items in the main project are usually selections of the composite mix region renders of a sound.

Strata files are arranged in a consistent folder structure:

A convention developed for audio file naming and categorization. All Strata audio file names follow the UCS. Region names also use the UCS because they are used to generate rendered file names.

Information embedded in the audio files that describes the contents and categories to which the audio is related. You can read this information for an individual source file of an item by right-clicking the item and clicking Source properties. You can also read and search the metadata of several files in REAPER using the Media Explorer, which you can open from the View Menu.

Alternatively, you can use other sound effect library database programs such as Soundminer, Basehead, Soundly, and so on. The metadata is structured in numerous tags, in the Broadcast Wave source and rendered files in the collections. You can find the metadata in the ASWG, BWF, INFO, XMP, and iXML tags. All of the relevant Universal Category System information can be found in the ASWG and iXML tags. This information includes Descriptions, Category, SubCategory, VendorCategory, SourceID, CreatorID, Explanations, and Synonyms, all of which are useful when you search for sounds in databases. Complete details of the embedded metadata for each collection are included in a SoundBook. Refer to the appropriate collection guide for more information on the corresponding SoundBook.

REAPER has extensive capabilities to embed metadata, with many schemas supported for a wide variety of file formats. See the REAPER manual for complete details.

Strata projects all have Project Render Metadata settings. Some of the values are common across Strata collections and many are specific to the particular collection, project, and individual audio files that the Strata REAPER projects are set up to render by default. REAPER wildcards are used extensively to provide metadata values for this in conjunction with the values ascribed to wildcards that make up the Data Regions.

You can open the Project Render Metadata window from the File menu.

We recommend you enable the following options so that your rendered files will include metadata that can be used by Open Associated REAPER Project, available in the Audiokinetic Reaper Tools Repository.