Boom!

This is a story of triumph.

I realize this is obscure, but:  if you ever find yourself doing batch file renaming, A Better Finder Rename is an incredible time saver.  (I wrote about it previously here.)

I’m in the middle of a comically tedious effort to change the embedded players on the RRR website from imeem to SoundCloud.  As a result of a process involving iTunes, Audio Hijack, and Logic, I had the following:  153 30-second preview tracks that followed a peculiar scheme.

• First 39 tracks:  original version of each song, grouped by album.
• Next 114 tracks:  alternate versions of those same songs, listed in the same order but in groups of three.

For instance, if track 1 was “Characters, Setting, Plot”, tracks 40, 41, and 42 were alternate versions of “Verb Tenses”.  Track 2 was “Dots and Dashes (Punctuation)”, so tracks 43-45 were alternate versions of it.  The alternate versions were in the same order, thankfully (Downtempo, Recall, Instrumental).

I needed a way to rename all those files without doing it manually; I refuse to do something so ghastly.  So:

• I pasted a list of the original file names into Excel and used some text functions (mostly vlookup, left, right, and concatenate) to create a pretty list.
• Then I copied/pasted that final list into a text document that simply listed all the new names, in order.
• Made a backup of my ugly-named tracks (which I later needed)
• Brought those ugly-named tracks into A Better Finder Rename, told it rename everything using my text file, and voila:  new names.

Bam!