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Ashyukun

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 19, 2008
265
1
So, I have a pair of bone conduction headphones that I use when swimming that have a modest amount of onboard storage and a built-in MP3 player, since bluetooth doesn't work the best through water. I love them and it's great having music when swimming laps- but the problem is that the player is VERY basic and specifically doesn't have a 'Shuffle' option- it just plays the files in order (by filename as far as I can tell) and then starts over again from the beginning.

I want to be able to select the files on the drive and have an app (or a script, if necessary) that will either (preferably) add a random number from 1 to N (N being the number of files) to the front of the filename or (less than ideal, but would work) rename the files at random (this would make changing up the music harder since I'd not necessarily be sure what each song was, but would still work). Unfortunately, all of the file renaming utilities that I've found don't have this functionality- some of them can do pretty complex things, but I've not found one that will do random numbering.

Hopefully someone here knows of one that does! Thanks!
 
Normally I'd do something like that in Terminal, but for this I'd probably try AppleScript (or Automator even).
 
Name Mangler 3 seems to do what you want quite handily. Drag the files from finder into its window, then click Add Prefix, click the + sign and pick Random Characters. Then you can set the number of characters to add, and restrict them to numerals, if you like.

I've found this app to be both easy to use and powerful. One thing I love about this app is that you can see what the names will be changed to before you commit to the change. Happens in real time right in the main window.

Not free -- $19 from the Mac App store or directly from their website (https://manytricks.com/namemangler/). You can download a trial version.

IIRC there some slight differences between the Mac App store and website versions -- something about Apple's sandboxing requirements for the App Store version. Ah, here it is: https://manytricks.com/osticket/kb/faq.php?id=13
 
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