mysilentfury

As I stated in my American Comics vs Manga post, I’ve been getting back into reading comics. I have gotten literally several thousand digitally archived comic books in various formats with various file names denoting each book. Personally, I like all the files of a certain type to be named uniformly and since many different people make scans of comic books, there are tons of different possible ways the books get named. Renaming several thousand files can get very time consuming, leaving little time/want to actually read them. In the course of my mass renamings, I’ve found two small programs that proved to be invaluable time savers: Extension Changer and Flash Renamer.

Extension Changer is a really, really simple program that, as the name suggests, allows you to change the file extensions on one or multiple files to something else. I used Extension Changer to mass-change .rar files to the more popular comic book format .cbr while going through my collection. All I had to do was highlight all the files I wanted changed, drag them into a small box within EC, type the new file extension and BLAMO! (that’s right, some comic book action word-age), all my files  were forever changed. The description on CNET.com says that you can also right-click on a file to change the extension, but as of build 0.5, you cannot as far as I can tell.

Flash Renamer also saved me many hours of renaming, only with this program, you rename the file name rather than the extension. This nifty little program has several key features that almost make it an essential program to have. I used it to take out unnecessary information and to format the file names to my liking. I renamed about 900 files in about three minutes, which is pretty excellent considering the time I would’ve spent editing each file individually. Flash Renamer can also help with casing (changing from upper-case to lower-case and vise-versa), file name replacing (I used the Add/Remove function which is slightly different than this mode) and , add/remove and space trim, which helps take out leading and trailing edge spaces and can actually merge spaces when they are in sequence with each other.  Oh and did I mention that the program will preview the new file name before you commit so you can tell if it’s just right? That’s a whole lot of awesome.

If you are a digital music collector this program will help with the automation of renaming files based on album, track and artist as well as ID3v1 and ID3v2 tagging. FR supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Flak and Speex, so it’s pretty comprehensive as far as what you can rename with it.

There are a couple of other things Flash Renamer can do, but at the cost of sounding like some kind of crazed fanboi, I’ll stop now. Suffice to say that it is really worth checking out and reinstalling every time you do a new Windows installation.

As I said above, both of these programs are real time savers when it comes to file/extension renaming. I will be keeping Flash Renamer on my computer from now on as I also download a plethora of other things that could use some renaming. Extension Changer on the other hand, is pretty much a “when the situation arises” type of program and should only be used if you know what you are doing. You could cause some screwy things to happen in Windows if the file extension is incorrect.

-That is all…