Renaming Items in Large Sample Libraries on a Mac: The Joy of Automator

I have been working on a personal library of sounds recorded of my own trumpet, quartertone trumpet and flugelhorn. After exporting them from Pro Tools I ended up with a large collection of files that needed to uniformly renamed…about a third of the way through I remembered Automator.

I *always* forget this easy workflow for renaming large amounts of items in a folder (on a Mac), good for more than sample libraries.

***WARNING***

BE VERY CAREFUL! THIS RENAMES ITEMS AND YOU CANNOT UNDO IT.

1) Open Automator.

2) Select "Workflow."

3) From "Library" click "Finder."

4) In the column that opens up to the right, select "Get Selected Finder Items" and drag it into the Workflow.

5) In the same column, select "Rename Selected Finder Items" drag it into your Workflow after choosing to duplicate or not.

6) I then select "Make Sequential" and click "New Name" and enter the desired name.

7) Go to your Finder/Folder and select the items to be renamed.

8) Return to Automator and click "Run."

So easy, but do be careful, you can rename more than you want to with an accidental selection.

Alpine to Bakersfield to Berkeley...a beautiful drive…

I'm guest lecturing at The Jazzschool in Berkeley, California this coming week...and decided to make a bit of a Spring Break trip out of it. Spent time with Nicholas Deyoe, Tom McNalley and Frannie Garretson at Highland Cafe in Los Angeles, then Louis Lopez at the Market in Pasadena, Kris Tiner at The Padre in Bakersfield and Chris Truitt at Dagny's in Bakersfield before heading off to Berkeley. Then I step out of my hotel in Berkeley and turn a corner and George Lewis is walking towards me...had a pleasant, but brief visit. This was doubly odd to see George as I had just been watching him speak in Elements of One, the Steve Coleman documentary....Dinner at Cafe Gratitude and now off to meet Leah Bowden, Phil Skaller and Tom Ferguson for cocktails...(Yes, Leah and Phil are in town. Wacky.)

Some of the views in the past 36 hours:

Morning, from my backyard in Alpine.

 

 

From Dagny's in Bakersfield.

 

 

On the 580 near Livermore. 

 

From my hotel in Berkeley.

Some pfMENTUM and Angry Vegan business....

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We're pleased to announce our latest release,
***Endless Pie***
featuring Jeff Kaiser and Phil Skaller.

The first review described it as "Wicked trumpet meets prepared piano in this intense and hilarious pairing of twisted minds." --San Diego Reader

It is available for purchase as CD or download, and you can stream the entire recording for free at:
http://www.pfmentum.com

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OTHER News:

We've started a Facebook page, please "Like" it to help get the word out!
https://www.facebook.com/pfmentumangryvegan

And we've started Twitter accounts:
https://twitter.com/pfmentum
https://twitter.com/angryvegan

We've got several recordings lined up for release, including:

Jeff Denson/Claudio Puntin

Paul Stapleton/Simon Rose and

Ted Byrnes/Nicholas Deyoe...

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Jeff Kaiser and Louis Lopez
pfMENTUM.com • AngryVegan.com