UTUVO Catalog － User Manual

Applies to: 0.1.0-beta, the invitation-only beta Written for: mixing and mastering engineers who are new to UTUVO Catalog How to read it: the chapters from “What Catalog is and is not” through “Sources and scanning” are the ones you cannot skip without misreading the app later. From “Search” onwards, treat the manual as a dictionary and look things up.

What Catalog is and is not

UTUVO Catalog is an asset catalogue for Atmos masters. It takes the few hundred ADM BWF files sitting on your drives and it organises them, finds them, checks them, and produces evidence you can hand to somebody else. Those four verbs are the whole app: organise, find, verify, hand over.

Four things it deliberately does not do, so that you never sit waiting for a button that was never built:

• No spatial audio rendering and no binaural monitoring. Everything you hear inside Catalog is a Stereo Downmix.
• No mastering advice and no batch loudness correction. It measures and reports; it does not touch the audio.
• No automatic deletion of duplicates. It lays the evidence out for you, and pressing delete stays your decision, in Finder.
• No uploading and no cloud collaboration. Out of the box it does not go online at all.

Underneath all of that sits the rule the rest of the design rests on: Catalog never rewrites your original ADM or WAV files. A scan reads headers and content fingerprints; it does not decode audio, move files, or modify them. Every field you type, every piece of artwork you attach, every approval you record lives in Catalog’s own overlay database, separate from the audio. Delete the entire Catalog database and your masters are still sitting on the drive, untouched.

How Catalog, QC and Player divide the work

Several apps make up the UTUVO family, and the boundaries between them are sharp:

So “I want to hear this Atmos master on the big speakers” is not a Catalog job; that is what Player is for. Audition in Catalog exists so you can confirm that a file is the file you think it is.

Three principles worth memorising

1. It reads, it never writes: the original bytes do not change.
2. Graded evidence: the screen always distinguishes a formal specification from an industry advisory threshold.
3. No pretending: Catalog does not guess. When it says a value is not measured, or not recorded in the source, that thing genuinely has not happened yet, or the file’s header never carried it. It is not a broken app.

Installation and setup

1.1 Install

Use the installer provided with your invitation. Open it, drag UTUVO Catalog into Applications, then launch it from Applications. Installation details for your build are included with the invitation.

1.2 What happens at the initial launch

On first launch, a hands-on 25-step tour begins automatically of 25 steps, arranged in seven chapters: welcome, intake, finding files, looking at detail, delivery, audition and organising, and keeping your data safe. It walks you through the toolbar, the sidebar, the Inspector and the delivery check.

The tour has two kinds of step:

• Steps that want you to act, such as choosing a folder of ADM BWF files or opening Library Health. Those wait until you have genuinely done the thing.
• Steps that just explain, which highlight a region of the screen. Press Next, or the right arrow key, and the tour moves on.

Press Esc, or Skip tour on the card, to leave at any point. Inside the tour, the left and right arrow keys move back and forward.

To see it again: the leftmost item in the toolbar, the slider icon, opens the settings menu, and inside it is Replay the hands-on tour (25 steps). It restarts from the beginning; if you have already registered a source folder, the tour skips that action step and takes you straight to the next one.

1.3 Granting folder access on macOS

Catalog is a sandboxed app, so it can read the folders you hand it and nothing else. The moment you pick a source folder, macOS asks for permission. Allow it.

A practical tip: for an external drive, pick the root of the volume. Granting the root grants the whole drive in one go, and any subfolder you create there later needs no second grant. Grant a single subfolder instead and you will have to repeat the picker when you want to scan its neighbour.

When a grant lapses, because you moved the drive to another USB port, updated the system, or reformatted the volume, source health reports it as Blocked. Choose that drive again with Choose source folder and access comes back.

The interface

This chapter shows you what each region looks like and where it sits. Under every figure is the name of the chapter that expands on it. The figures were taken against a test database holding four masters, so the numbers are smaller than yours.

The main window

Three columns, left to right: the sidebar, the card wall, the Inspector. Along the top sit the toolbar and the search field. Every region is described in “The screen map”.

The settings menu

The slider icon at the left end of the toolbar opens the settings menu, which holds Language, Appearance, the interface font, the tour replay entry, and, at the bottom, Danger zone. The interface font offers five choices; switching it does not affect your data. Themes are covered in “Appearance”, the danger zone in “How safe your data is”.

Search options

Search options, next to the search field, expands into a panel where you can assemble a query without typing. Field keys, the values is: accepts and the way numeric comparisons are written are all in “Search”.

The Inspector

Select a card and the Inspector on the right fills with that master. Every row of all three tabs is covered in “Inspecting one master”.

Library Health

Each source in the sidebar has a health panel behind it. What the five counters mean, and when a rescan is worth running, is in “Sources and scanning”.

Delivery Gate

The Delivery Gate runs a profile against a master and lists what it found. The five profiles, the four statuses and the evidence levels are in “Delivery Gate”.

Audition

Quick Look is the fast way to hear a master. What you are actually hearing, and why a file that is present may still refuse to play, is in “Audition”.

The database and its backups

The state of the database and its snapshots lives here. Automatic snapshot cadence, retention and size cap, plus the manual safety net, are in “How safe your data is”.

The screen map

The main window is four regions: a toolbar across the top, the sidebar on the left, a card wall or list in the middle, and the Inspector on the right.

2.1 The toolbar

The slider icon at the left end of the toolbar is the settings menu, and it governs four things:

• Appearance: the theme (see “Appearance”)
• Toolbar settings: presets and per-tool customisation (see “Collections, smart folders, tags and the toolbar”)
• Tool presentation: icons alone, or icons with names
• Replay the hands-on tour (25 steps), and inside Danger zone, the entry that deletes the whole Catalog database

Everything to the right of the slider icon is a tool button. The toolbar does not show all 28 tools by default, so when the manual names a button you cannot see, it is almost always hidden by the current preset. Choose All tools in the settings menu and every one of them appears.

2.2 The search field and Search options

Below the toolbar runs the search workbench: search tabs on the left, the search field in the middle, and a Search options disclosure on the right. Expanded, it holds:

• History: the queries you have run recently
• Column preset: which columns the result table shows
• Local search language pack: a purely local vocabulary crosswalk, which does not switch translation on by itself
• Locking the current results, which freezes them into a subset
• Sound facets, a local acoustic filter
• A collection filter, so you see just the masters inside one collection

⌘K returns to the search field and selects what is in it, from anywhere. ⌘T opens a new search tab.

2.3 The sidebar

Top to bottom, the sidebar has five sections:

1. Library: eight categories, computed for you (see below)
2. Collections: a bag of masters you filled by hand
3. Saved searches / smart folders: queries you kept
4. Sources: the source folders you registered, each with its online or offline state
5. Tags: your own axis of classification

The footer at the bottom names the local database version. That is the database schema version, and quoting it makes a bug report much easier to act on.

The eight library categories are computed live rather than maintained by hand:

2.4 The card wall and the list

The middle region has two views, switched with Grid / List in the toolbar:

• Grid is the card wall, good for artwork and for scanning quickly.
• List is a table, good for comparing many technical columns side by side.

Selection is shared between them, so switching view keeps what you had selected.

The small chips along the bottom edge of a card are that file’s technical fingerprint: object count, sample rate and channel layout, downmix trim state, and whether it is ready. When a title did not come from the ADM, an extra chip says Filename or Manual. The top right corner of the artwork carries badges for offline, for a damaged file, and for EXACT, CAND and NEAR duplicates.

2.5 The three Inspector tabs

The Inspector needs a selected card before it has anything to show. It has three tabs:

• Summary: title and artist, version override, resolution problems where they exist, delivery spec metadata, Catalog metadata fields, tags, and the ADM loudness summary
• ADM structure: the ADM object tree for this file. Each entity type has a display limit; the complete content is on the next tab
• Raw XML: the ADM axml source, downloadable as a file

Sources and scanning

3.1 Choosing a folder

Press Choose source folder in the toolbar, or the large button on the empty state, and pick a folder holding ADM BWF or WAV files. Grant access when macOS asks.

Once the scan starts:

• It reads headers and content fingerprints and does not decode audio.
• It moves nothing, renames nothing and rewrites nothing.
• When it finishes it tells you how many WAV files it looked at, how many ADM masters it imported, and how many it skipped.

Import ADM / BWF in the toolbar is the same intake for one file or a handful of files you pick directly.

3.2 The five numbers in Library Health

Open Library Health from the toolbar and every source folder shows five numbers that matter:

This is where people misread the app. Hundreds or thousands of Non-ADM (skipped) files are entirely normal: stems, sidecars, ordinary stereo files. They were never supposed to enter the library, and they do not mean the scan stopped halfway. The four counters above that one are the ones to drive to zero. Clean means all four at zero.

A second common misreading: seeing 200 masters does not mean the drive finished scanning, and a source marked Online does not mean every file inside it can be read. Trust the five numbers rather than the card count.

3.3 Rescanning what failed

The health panel carries a rescan action aimed at the issues alone. It retries known problem paths, up to 256 of them, and does not pretend to re-walk the whole drive. Use it after you have repaired a permission or reconnected a NAS.

The same panel exports the issue list as JSON or CSV, and the scan history as JSON or CSV. Those two files are the most useful thing you can attach to a bug report.

3.4 When to press Rescan

Rescan in the toolbar re-runs the whole header scan. Press it when:

• The folder changed outside Catalog, because files or directories were added
• A NAS or external drive came back
• Health showed Blocked and you have now fixed the permission

You do not need it day to day. Catalog keeps a watcher on the sources you registered.

3.5 External drives and a NAS going away

Unplug a drive, or lose the NAS, and those masters do not vanish. They go Offline, which means the file cannot be read right now, not that the file is gone.

• Cards show an offline badge, and Offline / missing in the sidebar gathers them.
• An offline file cannot be auditioned and cannot run a delivery check. That is honesty, not a defect.
• Reconnect and rescan, and Catalog matches them back by content fingerprint. It recognises content, not a disk UUID, so a different USB port, or the same drive on a different Mac, still lands on the same record.

External drives in the toolbar opens Drive diagnostics, where you can see each volume name, the state of its security bookmark and the state of its watcher. When something is stuck, look there before anything else.

3.6 NAS shares and whole work disks

Registering an entire NAS share or work disk makes the scan walk its session, snapshot and recycle folders too: a long scan for a handful of masters. Register the one folder that holds your ADM masters, and add the directory names of the session or snapshot folders you cannot avoid to the excluded names.

The snapshot and recycle-bin folders a NAS appliance writes by itself (for example @Recently-Snapshot, @Recycle, .snapshot) are skipped by default; you do not need to exclude them.

Search

Search is the part of Catalog you will use hardest, so the ten minutes it takes to read this chapter pay for themselves.

4.1 The basic rules

• Bare words search the full text.
• A colon makes it a field query, as in title:mix.
• A space means AND. artist:kaya title:mix requires both. (Typing AND does nothing, because the space already did it.)
• OR works in either case, separated by spaces: artist:a OR artist:b.
• NOT negates the term that follows it: NOT is:offline.
• A leading minus sign negates too: -is:offline.
• Quote a value that contains a space: artist:"Artist 007".
• Case is ignored.
• The raw string you typed stays on screen, so how the app read your input is never hidden from you.
• Results are sorted by import time, newest at the top, until you say otherwise.

4.2 Every field key

Each key below can be typed directly. Names separated by a slash are aliases for the same field; pick whichever you like.

A misspelled field name raises no error. It quietly falls back to a full-text search. So when a query finds nothing, check the spelling of the key before anything else.

4.3 What is: accepts

is: and status: are the same key. It takes:

• offline / missing: the file cannot be read right now
• online / ready: the file can be read
• manual: at least one field was filled in by hand
• unknown: a key field has no value yet
• unassigned-album / unassigned / missing-album: no album metadata yet
• unparsed: could not be parsed
• corrupt: the file structure is damaged
• unreadable: cannot be read
• permission / permission-denied: permission was refused
• final / mastered: the version label says this is the finished one

4.4 Writing duplicate queries

Two spellings, same effect:

• is:duplicate, is:exact, is:exact-duplicate, is:candidate, is:candidate-duplicate, is:near, is:near-duplicate
• duplicate:any, duplicate:exact, duplicate:candidate, duplicate:near

What the three grades mean is in “Versions and duplicates”.

4.5 Numeric comparison: leave the colon out

This is the single easiest thing in the manual to get wrong, so please keep this in mind.

For greater than, less than or not equal on a numeric field, the operator attaches straight to the field name, with no colon between them:

objects>8          more than eight objects
sr>=48000          sample rate at or above 48 kHz
ch!=12             channel count other than 12
duration<180       shorter than three minutes
bit>=24            bit depth of 24 or more

The supported operators are >, <, >=, <= and !=.

Written as beds:>0 it does nothing. As soon as a colon appears, Catalog treats everything after it as a value to match exactly, and no master has a bed count equal to the string “>0”. The query therefore returns zero rows, every time, with no error message to tell you why. The same trap catches objects:>8 and sr:>=48000. To compare, write beds>0, objects>8, sr>=48000.

With a colon there is exactly one meaning, equality: objects:8 finds masters with eight objects, and that spelling is correct.

4.6 Search tabs and history

⌘T opens a tab. Each tab remembers its own query, category, column preset and view mode, which suits working a delivery list and a duplicate sweep at the same time.

History in the expanded Search options lists the queries you ran recently; pick one to apply it.

4.7 Column presets

Which columns the result table shows is a Column preset. Four come built in:

• Catalog overview: title, artist, version, technical, health
• Delivery review: title, artist, version, source, technical, review
• Curation work: title, artist, tags, health, review
• Listening and usage: title, artist, source, technical, usage

You can also tick the columns you want and keep them under a name of your own with Save as a column preset….

4.8 The language pack

The Local search language pack is a local vocabulary crosswalk that lets you search Chinese or English fields with words from another language. Choosing a pack does not switch translated expansion on by itself; that is a separate control. It never goes online.

4.9 Locking results

Locking the current results freezes this batch into a subset, and every further narrowing happens inside it, without quietly editing the query you typed. It suits the workflow of picking 20 candidates out of 200 and then filtering further. Press it again to release the lock.

4.10 Where Sound facets stop

Sound facets is an opt-in workspace. Press analyse once and it computes local acoustic features for at most 32 of the current results, then lets you filter on RMS and high-frequency ratio.

Its edges deserve to be stated plainly:

• Anything not analysed, offline, or unreadable is never guessed into a match.
• It does not silently reorder your results.
• The numbers are local proxies, not a subjective judgement such as brightness, and certainly not a verdict on delivery.
• The cache holds derived numbers alone. No audio, and no change to any ADM or WAV.

4.11 Collections and exporting search evidence

Search options lets you nominate a target collection and add the current selection to it in one go, or view results from a single collection.

The same area has an export button that writes the evidence for this search: the query string, the results, and the source bindings. Use it when somebody asks how you arrived at this particular batch.

Inspecting one master

Select a card and the Inspector on the right carries every detail Catalog holds about that file.

5.1 The Summary tab, top to bottom

Title and artist: the display title and artist sit at the top, with a line of small type beside them saying whether the value was read from the ADM or inferred from the filename. Below is the full path of the file on your disk, ready to paste into Finder or a terminal.

Version override: when one piece of music has several exports, Catalog groups them automatically by name. When irregular naming puts them in the wrong group, these two fields let you set the version label and the group key by hand. Clear them and automatic grouping resumes with no residue left behind.

Delivery spec metadata: two rows, neither of them a guess.

• Downmix Trim shows Auto or Manual, read from Dolby’s private dbmd chunk.
• Binaural Render shows Off, Near, Mid or Far. It prefers binauralRenderMode in the ADM axml, and falls back to dbmd where the axml is silent.

Either row can read Not recorded in the source, in grey. Where there is room, the binaural row spells it out: Not recorded in the source (neither ADM nor dbmd carries it). That sentence means the header of this file never carried the field. It does not mean Catalog failed to read it, and it is not a delivery risk. It is grey because it is not bad news.

Catalog metadata fields: this section holds the facts you supply, stored apart from the source fields a scan produced and shown with its own confidence. The rules:

• A field you save by hand is locked automatically and recorded at 100 per cent confidence.
• Once locked, metadata import, the offline metadata assistant and artwork matching cannot overwrite it.
• Click the badge beside the field to unlock it; those sources can write to it again afterwards.
• The percentage is the confidence of the value’s origin: 90 read from the ADM, 70 inferred from the filename, 100 entered by hand.

Tags have nothing to do with any ADM field, which makes them the right home for a project code, a client, or a stage of work. Create them in the sidebar and tick them per master in the Inspector. They live in the overlay database on this Mac and are never written back into the audio.

ADM loudness summary: this card lists the number of programmes, beds and objects, then integrated LUFS, true peak and loudness range.

Loudness needs a note of its own. A header scan does not measure loudness, so a freshly scanned file shows integrated LUFS, true peak and loudness range as Not measured. Select the card, though, and Catalog measures it in the background, which is why you may see an analysing state pass by. A value stuck at Not measured usually means one of two things: the file is offline and unreadable, or the measurement timed out.

The button under that card, Measure this file with the Delivery Gate, takes the file straight into the delivery check and generates a formal report.

5.2 The ADM structure tab

This is the ADM object tree for the file. To keep the panel usable, each entity type has a display limit, and when it is reached the panel tells you the complete source is still available as raw XML.

5.3 The Raw XML tab

The ADM axml source. A download button saves it as a file, which is what you want when comparing specifications with somebody else.

Versions and duplicates

6.1 The three grades

Catalog splits “these two files look alike” into three grades of strictness, because what you should do about them differs completely:

Catalog never deletes a file for you. The three grades are evidence for your judgement; deletion stays your decision, in Finder.

6.2 Offline members and Last known

When a NAS volume goes offline or is disconnected, an exact group does not hide its offline members. It keeps them, marked Last known. The wording is precise: before they went offline, these files had identical content. It is not a claim that they still match today.

A last-known hash counts as a hint. The delivery check and the Release Workspace refuse to rely on it. Reconnect, rescan, and the group re-verifies itself; the mark disappears when the match is proven again.

6.3 Comparing versions

With a master selected, Compare versions in the toolbar puts the members of one version group side by side, down to object names, XYZ positions, gain and keyframes.

Loudness is not part of version comparison. A header scan does not measure loudness, and the comparison panel honestly shows it as not measured. To compare loudness, run a delivery check against each version.

6.4 The duplicate evidence workspace

Duplicates / candidates in the sidebar opens the evidence workspace. The three grades are listed separately, each group can be selected whole, and the whole body of evidence exports as JSON or CSV.

Audition

7.1 Opening Quick Look

With a card selected, press Space, as long as focus is not in a text field, a button or a slider. Hovering a card also reveals a row of small buttons under the artwork, one of which opens audition.

Quick Look gives you:

• A waveform you can drag to seek
• Play and pause
• Loop
• A/B loop: set an A point and a B point inside the file and listen to that stretch repeatedly. The segment can then be saved as evidence, along with your note and the source fingerprint, and exported as JSON. It never edits or copies the audio.

7.2 What you hear is a Stereo Downmix

The initial playback reminds you once: What you hear is a Stereo Downmix, not an Atmos render; judge sound quality in the original environment.

Take that seriously. Quick Look exists to confirm that a file is the file you wanted and to place A/B points, not to reach a verdict on sound. Real spatial monitoring lives in Player Pro and Audiophile.

7.3 Present does not mean playable

Quick Look reports presence and Playable separately. With the NAS offline the file is in the directory but will not play, and saying so is honest rather than broken.

7.4 Find by sound

The leftmost of the small buttons on a card is Find by sound, and the toolbar carries the same tool. It takes this file’s acoustic and technical features and looks for similar ones. The results are candidates, not conclusions.

7.5 The Shortlist

Shortlist in the toolbar collects the masters you want to hear into a list, so you can listen through them while rating and taking notes. It is ideal for a final listening pass before delivery before a delivery goes out.

Albums and releases

8.1 Browsing albums

Albums in the sidebar groups masters by album and artist and lists tracks, versions and offline state.

Each album card carries a Technical summary, which is purely informational: sample rate, bit depth, channel layout, total duration, and whether the formats agree. The panel states its own limits: it is a summary that reads without writing, it is not a loudness delivery pass, and it never rewrites a source file.

Masters with no album metadata gather under Unassigned album, where you can browse the tracks and fill the field in from the Inspector. To pull them up in search, type is:unassigned-album. Opening an album takes you back to a traceable album: query.

8.2 Read the loudness

Album cards have a Read the loudness action. It reads cached loudness evidence and does not start a full re-measurement, which is why it returns immediately. When some tracks have never been measured, it says the available data is insufficient rather than handing you an average assembled out of gaps. The result exports as JSON or CSV.

8.3 The Release Workspace

Release Workspace in the toolbar handles delivery-level structure: the hierarchy of release, recording, master and version; track order; UPC and EAN. Every track assignment is bound to a source fingerprint.

8.4 Continuous release audition

Inside the Release Workspace you can play a release straight through, with previous, next and pause in one row. There is a hard rule here: when the source is offline, its path is unavailable, or its source fingerprint has changed, audition stops at the Catalog boundary and tells you why. It will not play a file it is unsure about.

Delivery Gate

This is the most important step in the app: it converts “I think this is fine” into “there is evidence that this is fine”.

9.1 The five profiles

There are five traceable platform profiles, named exactly as follows:

• Apple Spatial Audio
• Amazon Music HD (Atmos)
• TIDAL (Atmos)
• UMG Delivery (Atmos)
• Sony Music (Atmos)

Behind each one is a specification document that can be pointed at. Catalog deliberately declines to invent a platform it has no specification for.

9.2 The four statuses

Every row of a report carries a status:

A skip is not a pass. The panel says so under the table: a skip means the evidence is incomplete, and the overall result will not pass. So a report full of skips is not good news; it means the file has not really been checked yet.

Even when the overall result passes, read it together with the evidence levels and the source fingerprint.

9.3 Evidence levels apply to six rows

The report has an evidence-level column, holding confirmed or advisory:

• confirmed: backed by an official specification document, so a violation is a hard problem.
• advisory: industry practice or a recommended threshold, so a violation earns a warning.

Evidence levels appear on the six rows the profile governs and nowhere else; the remaining rows show a dash. A dash is not a gap, it means that row was simply outside that profile’s scope.

9.4 The header row

Five cells sit above every report:

• Source fingerprint: which exact file this report is bound to
• QC rules: which version of the rules produced it
• Analysis basis: the basis the loudness numbers were measured against
• Format probe: sample rate, bit depth, channel count, object count
• Binaural: how the binaural modes are distributed in this file, and where the value was read from

The source fingerprint is the anchor of the whole report. Change the file’s content and the fingerprint changes with it, which is exactly why an older report cannot serve as evidence for this version.

9.5 Exporting

The top right of a report exports CSV or HTML. The HTML export is a complete table you can send to a client as it stands.

9.6 Running a batch

Run it from the button at the bottom of the Inspector and you check this file. Run it from Delivery Gate in the toolbar and you check the masters currently filtered, up to 32 of them. So narrow the batch with a search, then press the toolbar button.

A large external drive or a NAS source can take a while. Closing the window safely neither aborts the work nor loses it.

Metadata

10.1 Metadata recipes

Metadata recipes in the toolbar is where fields are changed in bulk. The available actions include trimming leading and trailing whitespace, collapsing repeated whitespace, changing case, Unicode normalisation (NFC), normalising an ISRC, normalising a catalogue number, regex extraction and regex replacement.

The flow never changes: preview, look at the conflicts, apply, and undo if you want to. The preview tells you row by row whether each one is applicable, conflicting, invalid, skipped or unchanged. Apply once you are satisfied, and a receipt is kept so the whole batch can be undone later.

10.2 CSV and XLSX import

Import metadata in the toolbar runs the same safe flow in four steps: choose the file, map the columns, preview, results.

Five ways of matching a row to a master are available: master ID (exact), path (normalised), filename (case-insensitive), ISRC (normalised) and catalogue number (whitespace stripped, lowercased).

The panel keeps an Import history, a record you cannot edit, in which undone batches also stay visible. The bytes of your ADM and WAV files never appear in that history, because they were never touched.

10.3 The offline metadata assistant

Offline metadata assistant in the toolbar produces metadata candidates without going online. It looks at what is already on your machine. What it produces are candidates, and nothing takes effect until you accept it explicitly.

10.4 Taxonomy candidates and controlled vocabulary

Taxonomy candidates in the toolbar is the controlled-vocabulary workspace. It loads a taxonomy pack, and a pack carries several schema profiles with different field coverage. Switch profile and you need to generate candidates again; existing candidates keep the profile they came from.

A candidate is in one of six states: pending, accepted, rejected, conflicting, applied or undone. When applying is blocked, the panel says why, for example The source fingerprint changed after the candidate was generated or The source is missing right now; repair or relink it before applying.

An exported vocabulary pack carries a version number and states that it remains a local crosswalk rather than official UCS.

10.5 Artwork candidates

Artwork candidates in the toolbar lists the artwork it found locally, again to be reviewed and adopted one at a time. You can also drag an image file straight onto a card to set the cover. Artwork lives in Catalog’s overlay and is never written into the audio.

Review, handoff and export

11.1 Review

Review in the toolbar is where fields are approved one at a time. Approvals enter the evidence and travel with the handoff later.

11.2 Handoff

Handoff in the toolbar hands over paths and lists, never media. It verifies the sources and then offers several routes:

• Reveal in Finder
• Hand off to Player
• Hand off to QC
• Produce a spotting manifest for a DAW, bound to source fingerprints
• Produce an evidence bundle: manifest, review evidence, anchors and BLAKE3 checksums. The paths embedded in it already have your home directory masked. Afterwards, Verify the bundle at this path re-verifies it whenever you like

Verification returns one of five verdicts: verified, source missing, source changed, insufficient permission, pending. Source changed means the content of the file differs from what it was when the evidence was recorded, and at that point the old evidence must not be treated as evidence for this version.

11.3 Export

• Copy path puts the full paths of the current selection on the clipboard.
• Reveal in Finder jumps straight to the file.
• Export Catalog report writes the metadata of the current view as CSV.
• Export delivery list writes the current view as a delivery list.

When the export destination falls inside a registered source folder, Catalog warns you and asks again. It will not overwrite an existing file, but a source drive deserves to stay clean.

11.4 The DAMF / IMF-IAB check

DAMF / IMF-IAB check in the toolbar inspects an interchange format without writing to it, and its scope matters: it checks the interchange format itself, and passing it is not a delivery pass. Delivery is settled in “Delivery Gate”.

11.5 The DDEX ERN bridge

DDEX ERN bridge in the toolbar previews DDEX ERN interchange data for you to work from when talking to a distributor.

Collections, smart folders, tags and the toolbar

12.1 Collections

A collection is a bag of masters you filled by hand, which suits a list such as the ten tracks going out this week. Select in the middle region, then create or add in the sidebar. Deleting a collection deletes no files and does not touch the masters in the database.

12.2 Saved searches and smart folders

These keep your current query, or a whole view, as a permanent entry that survives a restart. They store conditions rather than results, so files scanned in later that match the conditions turn up by themselves. Combined with a result lock, they become a work queue of your own making.

12.3 Tags

Tags are created in the sidebar and ticked per master in the Inspector. They are your own axis and have nothing to do with the ADM.

12.4 Toolbar presets

The settings menu, the slider icon at the left end of the toolbar, holds five presets:

Tick individual tools under Custom tools and the preset name becomes Custom toolbar, starting from whichever preset you were on.

A reset button in the top right of the panel returns you to Everyday.

12.5 Tool presentation

Tool presentation, in the same menu, has two settings:

• Icons only (saves space); hovering or focusing a button shows a tooltip.
• Icons and names, which writes the name beside every button. Switch to it while you are learning the app or running a demo, because several of the icons resemble each other.

12.6 The 28 tools at a glance

Appearance

Appearance in the settings menu offers ten choices: nine themes plus following the system.

The tenth choice is Follow system, which tracks macOS between Daylight and Midnight. Follow system is the default.

A theme is a personal preference on this Mac and has nothing to do with catalogue data; switching one touches no master. The first eight themes are shared with Player Pro; Studio is shared with UTUVO Monitor’s Studio theme.

How safe your data is

14.1 The original audio

Never written. No exceptions. A scan reads headers and content fingerprints, a delivery check reads, audition reads, and an export writes to the destination you chose.

14.2 The overlay database

Everything you do in Catalog lives in a SQLite database inside the app’s own data directory. The top of the Database recovery panel states it plainly: automatic snapshots are kept in the local app directory and contain no original media and no artwork.

That database is the asset you cannot rebuild. Masters can be rescanned and fingerprints recomputed, but the metadata you typed, the approvals you recorded and the release structure you built exist nowhere else. So it has two layers of protection.

14.3 Automatic snapshots

Catalog takes a rolling snapshot every 10 minutes, keeps the most recent 10, and caps the total at 4 GiB, discarding the oldest beyond that. The state is visible at the top of the Database recovery panel: when the last one was taken, whether it verified, and the reason the last one failed if it did.

Automatic snapshots live in the local app directory and hold no original media and no artwork. They are restore points for the database, not a backup of your masters.

14.4 The manual safety net

Database recovery and Save database in the toolbar open the same panel, which has three buttons:

• Save the whole database writes a complete copy of the SQLite state somewhere else.
• Restore from a SQLite snapshot verifies a single-file snapshot, then restores it.
• Build a recovery bundle produces SQLite plus a manifest plus checksums.

Restoring follows an iron rule: always restore into a new or empty folder. Catalog will not overwrite the database in use, will not switch the running app underneath you, and will not describe a physically offline source drive as restored.

The lower half of the panel keeps a history of saves and restores.

14.5 The danger zone: deleting the database

At the bottom of the settings menu, Danger zone holds Delete the whole Catalog database…. It takes three pages of confirmation:

1. Page 1 (step 1 of 3) tells you what will be deleted, such as the master count, the review records and the delivery check snapshots, and what will not be touched: the original audio, your NAS and external drives, and the automatic snapshot directory.
2. Page 2 (step 2 of 3) confirms you hold a snapshot. It takes one more before deleting. Should the database already be too damaged to produce a final snapshot, it says so outright and requires you to tick I understand this deletion will leave no snapshot before continuing.
3. Page 3 (step 3 of 3) asks you to type the current master count as the confirmation code, with the number printed beside the field. After you press the permanent delete there is no undo inside the app; recovery means restoring a snapshot.

14.6 It stays offline

Catalog does not go online by default. Online lookup is a two-layer opt-in and ships switched off.

Keyboard shortcuts

Frequently asked questions

Q: The app just opened, my masters are there, but the sources section says source health is loading. Normal. Catalog shows you the cached masters it saved last time while it probes source state in the background. Give it a moment. Nothing is missing.

Q: I scanned a whole drive and the numbers do not add up. Look at the five numbers in Library Health. Hundreds or thousands under Non-ADM (skipped) are expected; those files were never meant to enter the library. The counters to drive to zero are Pending, Blocked, Errors and Unparsed.

Q: I moved the external drive to another USB port and everything went offline. Catalog identifies files by content fingerprint rather than by disk UUID. Re-grant that drive, press Rescan, and they all reconnect.

Q: beds:>0 finds nothing. That spelling cannot work; see the comparison section of “Search”. Write beds>0.

Q: Loudness is stuck at Not measured. Catalog measures in the background once the card is selected. If it stays there, the file is probably offline, or the measurement timed out. Measure this file with the Delivery Gate forces a run.

Q: Downmix Trim says it is not recorded in the source. Is my file broken? No. The header of that file never carried the field. It is grey precisely so you can see it is not bad news.

Q: My whole delivery report is skips. Does that count as a pass? No. A skip means the evidence is incomplete and the overall result will not pass. Substantive items have to reach Pass before the report means anything.

Q: Can it delete my duplicates for me? It cannot and it will not. The duplicate panel gives you evidence; deleting is your decision.

Q: Can two Macs share one catalogue? Not today. Build a catalogue on each, and exchange conclusions through evidence bundles.

Q: Audition does not sound like Atmos. Correct, it is a Stereo Downmix. For spatial monitoring use Player Pro or Audiophile.

Q: I made a mess of my toolbar. The reset button in the top right of the settings panel returns you to Everyday.

Q: I deleted the Catalog database by accident. Deleting the database leaves the automatic snapshot directory alone. Open Database recovery, choose Restore from a SQLite snapshot, and restore into a new folder. Your original audio was never involved.

Glossary