Renamer4Mac - Fast Batch Renaming of All Your Files

As I was browsing the Internet today, I found a great website chock full of Phish concerts available in MP3 format for free downloading. Since I'm a big Phish fan, I grabbed a few shows I didn't have, but when they were done downloading, I was a bit dismayed to find that something wasn't quite right. None of the files in question had an extension! That means that if the file name should have been "01-SongName.mp3" then my version didn't have the ".mp3" extension.

If I'd downloaded the files individually, I could have made sure this didn't happen, but since I was using a download utility, I didn't notice and wasn't able to do anything about it until everything was completely downloaded.

Because of the missing extension, and the way the song files were named, my Mac thought that every single one of the more than 100 songs I'd downloaded was in fact a Unix executable application... and not an mp3 file at all! All it takes to fix this problem is go to the "Get Info" screen and add the mp3 extension, but again... I'd downloaded a few concerts... more than 100 songs.

What to do?

I went to Google and found a batch renaming utility named Renamer4Mac, and it saved the day.

Renamer4Mac is a shareware utility costing $26.00. In addition to simply helping out with my situation, Renamer4Mac is able to perform a whole lot of file operations, including Search & Replace, Insert, Remove, Number and Convert Case.

Search & Replace - If you have a whole slew of files (let's use images from a digital camera as an example), and they all contain a long string of unintelligible letters and numbers, but you want to give them a human readable name, all you need to do is search for the string you want to replace, and tell Renamer4Mac what to replace it with. It's easy.

Insert - This is what I used to rename my mp3 files. All I needed to do was tell Renamer4Mac what text I wanted to insert into the file name, and where to insert it. You can insert your text at the beginning or end of the file name, and can take into consideration the file name, the extension, both or neither.