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JSO Batch rename illegal characters in Pro Tools.

I've been trading files with other picture and sound people for a few decades now. And while it does seem computers have become more tolerant of illegal characters, I'm still very suspicious—and continue to be warned by I.T. specialists—that you should really only ever have letters, numbers, and underscores in your naming. Spaces and hyphens if you're feeling frisky. But certainly not & or " or ?%#~! A little script that will get rid of all those nasty special characters you may inherited in that Pro Tools session. Just one command, done in less than 30 seconds. While this script is not perfect, it will go through and batch-rename most of these in a way that is generally logical for how they are typically used. Sometimes it just removes the character entirely, sometimes replaces it with an underscore. And there are a few special cases where it made sense to be a little more tricky than that. Things it can't do, that I know of at the moment: • It can't rename periods. As much as they shouldn't be in the middle of a filename, I'm wary of possibly removing file extensions and messing things up. • It can't account for creating duplicate filenames. If removing/replacing any of these special characters causes the new clip/file name to be the same as an existing one, I imagine the script will fail. Let me know if you find it useful, or if you discover any other particularly good or problematic things about it.

Here's what it does, in order. These are also listed as comments above each block in the script, so it is easy to change, move, delete, or comment out any block you need.

• replace comma-space with underscore, then deselect checkboxes on this first pass.

• replace comma with underscore

• remove single quote / apostrophe

• replace double quote with underscore

• replace forward slash with underscore

• replace backslash with underscore

• remove left parenthesis

• remove right parenthesis

• replace plus sign with underscore

• remove semicolon

• remove colon

• remove question mark

• remove exclamation mark

• replace "at" sign with underscore

• remove poundsign / hashtag

• replace " & " with " and "

• replace ampersand with underscore

• replace asterisk with underscore

• replace left square bracket with underscore

• replace right square bracket with underscore

• remove grave (backwards apostrophe)

• remove tilde (squiggle above the grave)

• remove paragraph marker (like a backwards P with two stems)

• replace ellipsis with underscore (specifically the special character ellipsis, not just three periods in a row)

• replace bulletpoint with underscore

• replace dash with underscore

How do I get JSO Batch rename illegal characters in Pro Tools.?

JSO Batch rename illegal characters in Pro Tools.  is a package built on the SoundFlow platform. To get it, please follow these steps:

  1. Sign up as a new SoundFlow user if you don't already have an account.

  2. Install the SoundFlow app on your Mac.

  3. Open up the SoundFlow app, click the "Store" tab

  4. Locate the 'JSO Batch rename illegal characters in Pro Tools.' package by searching in the search field.

  5. Click the Install button.