Read track names from imported audio files

Damir

hi Peter, I use Logic Pro to create multitracks, it creates a file , example, Love me tender (DRUMS) , would it be possible as we select all the needed tracks that the bracketed DRUMS and all other tracks bracketed names get automatically placed in to the track names so the mixer is immediately labeled for us ?

jaytrax

Just export each file and rename accordingly
make sure to export all the same length, set your project length of selection

Love Me Tender - Drums
Love Me Tender - Bass
Love Me Tender - Gtr etc

Damir

jaytrax Love Me Tender - Drums
Love Me Tender - Bass
Love Me Tender - Gtr etc

Thanks Jaytrax, does that mean putting a slash will label the tracks automatically in ST4?
If so , does this mean Logic Pro multitrack export labelling is not compatible with ST4?
I was hoping to avoid relabeling.

AnthonyB

I'm not aware of any ST4 Track Naming automation based on regex/parsing of imported audio track filenames.

I do think it is a nice idea.
I wouldn't like to see it tied to any specific DAW audio export features as that reduces the feature's utility.

I'd suggest the more elegant way of implementing it would be a regex pattern. Ideally, this should be customizable in settings so that if people already have established standards for naming their audio tracks, then the regex can be customized to suit.
E.g. you don't want to hard code the regex so it only treats something inside round brackets as a track name, as you can be assured that a bunch of people will say that they have all their audio files using square brackets!

Would also have to keep in mind that the Track Name field in ST4 1937 is limited to 8 characters, so any parsing would have to handle adapting values greater than 8 characters (prob. just take first 8 chars and trim the remainder).

peter

There are no automatic naming conventions for tracks. Each user would like to use a different file format. So there would be a need to make this configurable. Something like Regex will definitely not work for regular users.

This is a feature to consider for a future version, not for this beta. I will move the thread to Feature Requests to vote on.

AnthonyB

peter I acknowledge that Regex would overwhelm normal users. I oversimplified my suggestion.

By default, you could have a default set of rules that people could choose to follow, e.g. contents of last set of round brackets in filename will be used for Track name in ST.
You could provide some basic options under Settings to change the behaviour, e.g. square or curly brackets instead of round.

A subset of people may even want to be able to define and import a Track colour from the filename (personally, this seems like overkill to me, but that's just me).
I'm sure someone will even want to import the track volume value 🙂

Regex still running it behind the scenes to perform all of this.
Then possibly an Advanced Setting for power users to alter the Regex (because they should know what they are doing).
Advanced Setting to optionally modify the Regex.

Given the idea of an internal Batch Processing engine in ST for performing bulk edits (e.g. track names), is also maybe on the cards down the track, it may be less of an issue.

Some may also suggest ID tags embedded in the audio file could be used for track naming. I guess it depends on how universal this would be (depends on DAW? depends on file format? other?) and therefore how many people would benefit.

Vedeja

I think it is not worth having, for the software complexity it adds. I can see some here have an impressive thousands of songs while I’m in the low hundred. However, isn’t this just something you would use when creating a song or as a big bang upon migration to ST4.

Riff

This would be an amazing addition! I've got hundreds of multitrack songs which translates to thousands of tracks and just doing a few of the songs is agonizingly monotonous. My OCD will force me to spend hours and days (weeks?) renaming tracks, and also color coding them (I match them to KV in my DAW somewhat).

Love Me Tender - Click.mp3.... Rename to Click in ST4. Change color
Love Me Tender - Cues.mp3.... Rename to Cues. Change color
Love Me Tender - Drums.mp3.... rename to Drums. Change color
Love Me Tender - Bass.mp3... Rename to Bass. Change color
etc etc for one song!

Not to mention Buses. My click is always Bus 1, cue is always Bus 2, Drums 3, Bass 4, everthing else is Bus 5. It's tedious to repeat this simple task over and over.

I understand that people have different file naming conventions, but it would be simple to run a batch rename using a tool like Mp3Tag to match a key set by ST4. So if the key was double brackets, Love Me Tender - [[Click]].mp3 is automatically loaded into Track 1, renamed to Click, set to Bus 1, set color to yellow.

It probably won't be as bad for adding new songs, but looking at my library I've got a lot of work to do when the time comes.