Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with filename

How to bulk rename itunes files from external data source.

jlowen — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:10:40 -0800

How can I bulk rename files in itunes according to data contained in a separate file? I have 4000-some .wav files in itunes that are essentially field recordings of people talking. The files are named with a 10 digit unique id number and the date acquired. Example: 1234567890_11122009. In a separate csv file I have the identifying information of the individual with the same unique ID number.

I have rated all 4000 recordings based on quality and want to maintain those ratings, but would like to rename the files to drop the unique ID and instead insert the person's name from the csv file. I.e. 1234567890_11122009 becomes Smith_Mary_123_Fake_Street_Anytown_STATE

Can anyone picture a workflow that would accomplish this mass filename change while still maintaining the ratings?

I use a mac and have a decent understanding of automator, grep, csv files etc, but have no real programming skill. I am willing to convert recordings to a different format (mp3 etc.) if that would help. Any ideas?

How to set Excel2003 to automaticall include file name and path on printed spreadsheets

Wroksie — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:21:16 -0800

How can I set up Excel 2003 to automatically include the file name and path on every spreadsheet when printed? I have been tasked with figuring this out and setting it up every computer in the office (as the only person here who doesn't poke the actual screen when asked to press 'start', I am the default IT guru - yes, it's that bad).
Anyway, I used this tutorial to figure out how to do this using a macro, and it works great - but I have to go in and add the code to every spreadsheet, which is a pain, and which I doubt my coworkers would be willing or able to do. What I need is a way to set the default template to automatically include the file name and path on every spreadsheet without the user having to do anything or even think about it. I would prefer it be in the footer so that it only shows on printed copies, as per the above tutorial, and not included in an actual cell, but at this point I will take what I can get.

How do you get the mat file name?

cali59 — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:50:49 -0800

How do you get a Matlab script to know the name of its own .mat file? I have a bunch of .mat files that have descriptive names (ex "round fluffy A.mat", "square fluffy B.mat") and I'd like to process the data and generate a figure with the name of the mat file, only .fig. I don't want to have to hard code the filename, or use a dialog box to input it or anything, I just want a way to be able to retrieve the argument that was used in the command that shows up when you double click the .mat file, namely

load('C:\PATH\FILENAME.mat')

I'm sure there's plenty of other ways I could be doing this, but after searching google and MATLAB help, it's kind of driving me nuts that I can't just find a simple way to do this. Am I overlooking something? Thanks.

How to merge multiple text files keeping original filename and date

chimrichalds — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:07:01 -0800

Hi AskMeFi. Can someone tell me how to combine 350 text files into one large text file so that the original filenames and dates are included above (or below) each entry? I'm using Vista Home Premium and they are all generic .txt files. I'm moving all of my notes into Evernote but want to save the names and dates of the individual txt files.

What's up with my music files on my PC?

ishotjr — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:12:02 -0800

What is up with my music files' titles turning into nonsensical four-letter titles? Ok, this is a little long, but it's a weird problem that is hard to describe.

I use iTunes on a (Dell) Windows Vista PC laptop. I noticed this issue probably over a year ago, but was too lazy to do anything about it until now.

Thousands of my music files are in files within "C:\My Music" that are named with F and then a number, F00 thru F49. All of my music was originally in "C:\Users\ishotjr\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music," and some of it still is. Within the F-named folders, the files are named/songs titled in three different ways.
1) Most are with four letters in caps, example: AJOM. They are seemingly random and not acronyms of the real titles. Within this, most, in the artist/album, etc. fields in Windows Explorer, have the correct info. A few have nothing at all in those.
In either case, if I choose to play it in iTunes (by clicking the option within Windows Explorer, where I'm viewing the files), it brings me to the song that is properly titled within iTunes (i.e., AJOM takes me to "Levitate Me" by The Pixies in iTunes).
2) A few of the songs are named with their correct name, but with the track number proceeding it (i.e. 01 Debaser)
3) Even fewer are named completely normally, with just the actual song title.

Another weird twist is that in iTunes itself, there are a handful of files that are actually named with the four letter names. Most of these are all from a Velvet Underground greatest hits compilation, but there are a few that aren't.

There seems to be no pattern as to how I procured the music and what's in these weird files. I did bring most of the music onto my computer from my iPod when I got the computer, but some of it I have purchased since owning this computer. The software I used to bring the songs from the iPod to the computer was some free program that I don't recall the name of and deleted to save hard drive space when I was done using it.

The real kicker is that most of these weirdly-named tracks are NOT duplicates, so I can't just delete them. Most of the time, it's one or two songs from a given album that are named weird and in the F-named folder instead of in the folder with the rest of its album-mates.

It seems that I might be stuck consolidating the 49 "F" folders into one (not so hard, just tedious), then trying to rename the thousands of song backs to their proper names by clicking them through to iTunes and manually entering the name of each song into the file name in Windows, then moving all of the songs to the correct place. It's not necessary to do this to be able to listen to the songs, but it's annoying having my files all over the place, especially when I want to delete entire albums off of my hard drive to make space.

My actual question is two-part:
1) Has anyone ever had this weirdo thing happen to their music files before?
2) Does anyone know a better way to fix it than to do everything manually (which will take for-ev-er)?

Help an iTunes hater out...

Area Control — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:46:40 -0800

Help an iTunes hater. I have 400 similarly tagged items I want to delete as I listen to them. Why won't iTunes let me have a column that is just "filename"? Every other media player can do that. And don't even get me started on the "keep my music organized" check box. The only way I could get my 400 items into iTunes with unique names was to turn that off, import the 400 items, and use a 3rd party id3 tagger to read the filename into the tag. I thought the Mac experience was supposed to be easy. I must be missing something really stupid. Is there an easier way?

Digital camera file renaming help

mr. creosote — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:39:31 -0800

Is there simple software for a digital camera flash card that will offload my pics -and- change the filename to the date they were taken? I have a Pentax point & shoot digital camera, and offload my pics by putting the flash card in a reader and copying the contents. The camera names its output files imgp0410.jpg, imgp0411.jpg, etc. This isn't very good for long term archival. I've always preferred something based on the filename YYMMDDxxxx.jpg (YY, MM, DD being the numerical year), which makes sorting and organizing much easier for me, especially years later. The pictures do contain EXIF data and file stamps that contain the date, so this theoretically should not be a big deal.

Are there any freeware or shareware programs anyone's whipped up to handle this?

Mac connected to server gets strange filenames, sometimes.

Wild_Eep — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:03:22 -0800

A mac on a network connects to a share point on the server and sees this instead of seeing this. Restarting the client makes the problem go away, for a while.

Server is a DualG5 Xserve. Client is a G5. Both are running fully patched 10.4 server and 10.4, respectively.

What's going on?

Trouble sorting files by filename in Outlook.

naju — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:13:57 -0800

I'm having trouble sorting (or rather, unsorting) files in Outlook. I have thousands of .msg e-mail files in a folder, and they are carefully ordered by filename - Email100.msg, Email101.msg, Email102.msg, etc. The information in these emails needs to be put into an Excel spreadsheet, and so I've been using Outlook to do the exporting of the e-mail contents. Yesterday I was doing this, and it was no hassle - just drag and drop the files into an Outlook folder, and they're listed in order (Email100.msg first, then Email101.msg second). Then export to Excel and again, everything's in order. Cool.

But today I start up my computer and Outlook seems to have gone bonkers with the sorting. No matter what I do, when I drag and drop the files into the Outlook folder, it lists them according to the date received, NOT according to the order of the files. This occurs even when I explicitly tell Outlook to not arrange by date received. Currently all settings are on "Arrange By: (none)", and it's still doing it. It's like the program is just ignoring me. And there seems to be no explicit way in Outlook to sort by the filename, so that's out. Am I doing something wrong? This is with Outlook 2003.

How to deal with file names that are too long

hydrophonic — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:44:50 -0800

Windows XP annoyance: I've managed to create some files with names that are too long. How can I rename them? I can't open them, and I can't find a way to copy, move, or burn them. Usual methods of renaming files don't work (F2, right-click menu, Properties, Windows Explorer, etc.) I've tried shortening the path by renaming folders, but that didn't do it either. These are mp3 files, by the way.

Modify Windows Explorer behaviour in renaming savefiles

quam — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 06:16:51 -0800

Saving a file on Windows XP, I use Explorer to select the folder I wish to save to. When I navigate the directories, clicking on an appropriate folder I occassionally move the cursor over filenames. As I mouseover filenames, Explorer replaces the default name of the file I wish to save with the name of the file I mouseover. Can I modify Explorer to prevent this filename replacement? For example, if I download "foo.exe" Windows opens an Explorer dialog to select the location of the folder to save "foo.exe." If I mouseover "bar.jpg" while navigating directories, Explorer changes the name of "foo.exe" to "bar.jpg." I wish to save the file as it is originally named or how I wish to name it.

This is an annoyance and I have longed searched for a setting/modification to eliminate this behavior with no luck.