How do you organize many sound files (assume I have downloaded all free sound assets + 10 paid assets). Should I rename files? or should I just tag them?

but then which tags should I use? I have to find sounds by use-type, mood, etc but I think there are zillion ways to classify sound, so maybe a sound expert can help me in how to tag sounds so I can quickly find the sounds I need.. I highly suspect tagging correctly all sounds is a never ending job.. ^^

I'm not a sound guy but have worked with them on many projects and at the end sound files are assets and assets have to be used by the code correctly :wink:

We were go and have had a sound manager that loads and manages sound assets especialy so that there will never be wasted RAM in the game. For this we needed to project dependent relate each sound set to certain area of the gameplay code (enemies for example have different sound sets that were loaded when the enmy is spawned) so the code needs to know where to find each sound set.

For loading dynamic the sound files needed to be placed in Resources folder and for not wasting project space, Resources got a sub folder Audio, We then grouped the sound files into sub folders depending on the usecase e.g Resources/Audio/Warrior whitch has had for example Walk, Attack, Shout and Die sounds.

Simply think where sound is used and organize them as simply as possible

For your library of sounds - i.e. assets not necessarily inside a project, there are 3rd party tools for managing them. They're not always cheap but they are worthwhile if you do a lot of audio work. They include AudioFinder, Soundminder, Mutant, and Basehead. I believe Mutant might be free, but I've not used it myself. But if you're happy to have everything inside the project, you can use Unity tagging.

I think the important thing is to do it based on how they'll be used. Characters, vehicles, weapons, ambient, UI, music, etc. Within each category you can drill down by species, vehicle type, weapon type, environment type, etc. And within that, descriptive names usually suffice.

Yes, Unity does allow you to tag assets, but this approach would mean all the assets would need to be in your project whether you're going to use them or not, which is not always what you want.