We received a question from community member Chris Testa about what is the best way to rename lots of files especially when managing deliverables. So we asked the team, what they do in this situation, and in this article show and tell us the techniques and tools they use.
The Question
Chris asked…
“Naming files. I have yet to figure out a great way to name files either through automation or shortcuts and I’d love to know what you are using. I have Soundflow and I’m speaking to people about that but for instance, I just did a show for Discovery plus and all the mixes had to be multi-mono and the total number of channels with the Master prints and stems was 41. I’m sure that’s not even big compared to what some people submit for certain things but if there is anything I’d love to figure out how to automate and speed up it would be that".
So what solutions do you all use to name and manage all the deliverables we have to handle these days? Thanks.”
So we asked our expert team to help answer this question and the overall consensus was A Better Finder Rename with one person using Apple’s Automator.
Nathaniel Reichman - I use A Better Finder Rename (ABFR) for deliverables, and also for our giant music libraries. It's especially good at taking text files or tab-delimited data and smart-renaming tens or hundreds of files in one go. All that said, I do use the Batch Renaming function in Pro Tools as well, which was a great improvement when it was introduced.
Alex Knickerbocker - ABFR has very powerful batch file management. I use it all the time in large scale sound effects library work and it’s awesome. It is a very capable way of doing more than simple renaming.
Russ Hughes - I’ve been using ABFR for years. It’s a great app.
Reid Caulfield - ABFR is great but can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I guess like anything.
Michael Costa - Once a year, at Christmas, I do a gig where we need to deliver hundreds of files (in 24 channel blocks) for a JoeCo machine. Its track naming requirements are explicit and ABFR does it for me in seconds, once I have configured a few basic parameters.
Steve DeMott - I used to use Automator, but Apple warned us that it was going away (along with AppleScript). So I tried my hand at some shell scripts, but it’s just so cumbersome to write bash scripts.
Interestingly Damian Kearns still uses Automator...
Damian Kearns - Yes, I still use Automator, the basic Mac application that’s been around since 10.4 and is at its core, an Applescript interface. This is the only app I’ve ever used to rename, transcode, move or otherwise manipulate batches of files.
Step By Step Guides
We asked Michale Costa and Nathaniel Reichman to walk us through a step by step guide on how they use A Better Finder Rename and Damian Kearns to show us how he uses Automator.
An Example Of How To Use A Better Finder Rename
Every Christmas, I work on this great gig for the City Of Melbourne, here in Australia.
A huge Christmas tree is filled with speakers and we mix our music into groups of: 3 x 5.0, 1 x LCR, 1 x 2.0 and an LFE.
Each of these is bounced from Pro Tools in a single move. [Above left]
Given the way Pro Tools names files, I end up with something that looks like this. [Above right]
The problem is that the audio player on the gig is a JoeCo, which has very specific file naming requirements. JoeCo describes it as “nnn-tt.wav” where:
‘nnn’ is the song number between 001 and 100.
‘tt’ is the track number between 01 and 24.
After that you can add a descriptive title of some sort.
Of course. this could be done manually, but it would be time-consuming considering the number of songs we output, and a single character out of place in any file name would cause a failure in the system. Because of the way our pipeline works, every error like this will set us back quite a while.
I use ‘A Better Finder Rename’ which I innocently got as part of an online bargain software bundle many years ago. To be honest, I wasn’t even interested in the app at all, but it came in the bundle and only later discovered its usefulness.
I drop all the individual tracks for a song into the list [see above] and then drag them around into the correct order that we need on output. [see below].
A Better Finder Rename is amazingly configurable – it’s actually can be quite daunting at first, in terms of how many things it can do, but once you understand it, it is a very powerful tool.
You can see my final settings above, and it’s wonderfully helpful that ABFR provides a column showing what the modified name will look like. That way you can always be sure an extra space hasn’t been added or something similar.
After committing the change, all the files have their names immediately changed and the files are ready to add to the JoeCo. [see right].
There you have it. A very specific naming protocol resolved in just a few seconds with A Better Finder Rename.
A Second Example Of How To Use A Better Finder Rename
I’m the music producer for a television show at Rhumba in New York City. We’re in the sixth season of the show, and have amassed a large library of original songs and underscore in the years we’ve been working on it. Managing the thousands of music cues has become an important task. One file naming trick I picked up in the early days of the show involves using Pro Tools and A Better Finder Rename to prep music cues on their way into Soundminer. Every music cue ultimately needs to be formatted the following way (names have been changed to protect the innocent):
RL526m06 YACHT-Chase 1
Where “RL” is the TV series code, “526” is the episode number, “m06” is the cue number, “YACHT” is the episode name, “Chase” is the cue type, and “1” indicates the first cue of this type in the episode (lots of additional info beyond this is entered into the Soundminer metadata fields, but that’s the subject of another article).
There are often 20-30 cues per episode, so instead of going through the tedious process of naming the clips in Pro Tools, I use the batch rename function in Pro Tools to simply name them sequentially as they appear in the episode; 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 (make sure to check timeline order when doing this). Then I export that string of files to the music library folder as WAV files:
01.L
01.R
02.L
02.R
03.L
03.R
04.L
04.R
05.L
05.R...
Then in A Better Finder Rename I use one of its most powerful features “Rename from file list”. To use ABFR terminology, this is the first “Action” ABFR is grabbing data from a standard text file here. Very handy.
And I use this list in my text file:
01 Open.L
01 Open.R
02 Exposition.L
02 Exposition.R
03 Meeting.L
03 Meeting.R
04 Search A.L
04 Search A.R
05 Song.L
05 Song.R
06 Chase 1.L
06 Chase 1.R...
But that doesn’t do the whole job. I still have series code, episode number and episode name to put in. So in A Better Finder Rename I have two more “Actions” to execute:
...and episode name...
And then I get to my destination quickly:
Done!
RL526m01 YACHT-Open.L.wav
RL526m01 YACHT-Open.R.wav
RL526m02 YACHT-Exposition.L.wav
RL526m02 YACHT-Exposition.R.wav
RL526m03 YACHT-Meeting.L.wav
RL526m03 YACHT-Meeting.R.wav
RL526m04 YACHT-Search A.L.wav
RL526m04 YACHT-Search A.R.wav
RL526m05 YACHT-Song.L.wav
RL526m05 YACHT-Song.R.wav
RL526m06 YACHT-Chase 1.L.wav
RL526m06 YACHT-Chase 1.R.wav
All of these steps in ABFR can be saved as a single “Preset,” so quite complex workflows can be developed and saved for future use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. File naming is important, but file metadata is even more important. Stay tuned for more on metadata and music libraries.
An Example Of How To Use Apple’s Automator
I use Apple’s Automator program for a variety of tasks, from renaming files to removing files, to moving and backing up files using Calendar events. It’s a pretty powerful tool that’s been a part of the Mac Applications folder since macOS 10.4.
My main use for Automator is to rename files. To that end, hiding in my Documents folder is an Automator Workflow called ‘Rename Finder Items’. Because I want to manipulate the variables each time I go to rename files, I chose to use the Workflow format, rather than one of Automator’s other formats like ‘application’ or ‘calendar alarm’. In this video demonstration, I show how I rename batches of files.
Here’s a step by step description showing how I build Automator command sets to workflow a task.
When I open Automator and create a new doc I select which type I want to use. Workflows are preferable where variables change with each use, rather than applications or calendar alarms which to me, are more defined and static use cases.
Having chosen the workflow option, I can see along the left side of the window that I can choose a variety of starting points from which to build. For this example, I’ll choose ‘Files & Folders’ since these are the typical sorts of things I want to rename.
At this point, I drop a few sample files into the large space on the right of the window.
You can see it’s create part of the workflow for me, “Get Specified Finder Items”. Once I’ve built this workflow and executed it, I tend to remove the files from that pane to blank it for future use.
From the variables column near the centre, I’ll drag ‘Rename Finder Items’ into my workflow next.
The drop down menu underneath the action name can be switched from “Add Date or Time” to one of a few other options. I’ll go with “Replace Text” this time.
I’m going to replace the word ‘screener’ with ‘final mix’ because the mix has been approved.
Once I’ve input the find and replace names, I hit the little “Run” button at the top right of the window to execute this workflow.
A quick check of the files in the Finder shows the words are where I wanted them. If I don’t like this result, I can simply blank the “Get Specified Finder Items” workflow area and put in the files again and revise them until I have the files named appropriately.
At this point, I will blank that top area and save the workflow somewhere I can access it for later use.
Now that I’ve named them, I want to move the files over to Dropbox. The Mac’s Finder app tends to want to copy files from one volume to another which then adds the step of deleting the original files. Automator allows me to move, rather than copy, with a simple manipulation of the editing workflow.
Here, I’ve eliminated the rename workflow and added the newly named files back in. Next, I’ve selected the “Move Finder Items” option in the centre variables column and added it to my workflow. I’ve designated the destination as a folder inside Dropbox. I then “Run” the workflow with the little button at the top right and my files are moved, rather than copied, to the new location.
Now, I can see the wheel spinning at the bottom of the Automator workflow window, The move will take a few moments, given the size of the files.
A quick check of the file paths in both the destination and point of origin shows the files have indeed moved location. [Below left]
And they’ve moved from one volume to another. The original “Bounced Files” folder now has nothing in it. [Above right]
Automator is functionally much more than a renaming application. It’s a full-service management program. If you spend a little time with it, you’ll find many creative ways to manipulate all sorts of data.
Sadly, Apple will replace Automator in macOS Monterey with another app called Shortcuts. Hopefully, it’ll provide the years and depth of functionality I’ve had out of Automator.
In Conclusion
There you have it, two macOS based tools to be able to rename files and prepare them as Deliverables for a project. We hope this helps Chris Testa, who asked the original question but others as well.