5 March 2026 | 6 min read
A file naming convention for audio that still works in three years
Every naming convention works on day one. The test is whether it survives version 14, a second recordist and a client who renames everything.
A naming convention is a contract with your future self and with everyone downstream. It fails in predictable ways, so it can be designed against those failures from the start.
Sort order is a feature
Names are sorted as text, which means the leftmost field decides the grouping. Put the field you most often want grouped first: category for a library, scene number for production audio, date for ongoing recordings.
- Dates as YYYYMMDD, never DD-MM-YY. Only one of those sorts chronologically.
- Versions as v01, v02, and keep going past v09 without switching format.
- Takes zero padded to the number of digits you might realistically reach.
One separator per job
Use underscores between fields and spaces or hyphens inside a field. That single rule makes names machine parseable: split on underscore and you have your fields back, in order, forever.
Say what it is, not what you thought at the time
good, better, final, FINAL2 and use this one are not descriptions. They carry no information a week later. Describe the content: interior, wet, distant, hard close, slow. Adjectives that a stranger could match to a sound.
Channels belong at the end
When you split a poly WAV into mono stems, the channel identity goes last so that all channels of one recording stay adjacent in a sorted listing. Boom, lav1, lav2 sitting together beats them scattered across the folder.
Write it down
A convention that lives in one person's head is not a convention. One page, examples included, in the project folder. It is the cheapest post production insurance available.