Name Mangler and Moom productivity apps

Many Tricks is a company whose stated mission is to create useful tools that do their job efficiently, have a clear interface, and that are enjoyable to use.

They have several such tools that they offer, including the very popular Butler launch manager, but the two I use nearly every day are Name Mangler and Moom, which automate common tasks of file renaming and screen re-sizing, respectively.

Listen to the podcast episode

On the Scoring Notes podcast, David MacDonald and Philip Rothman discuss how to be more productive with file renaming apps such as Name Mangler and Renamer, and also explore the suite of PDF batch processing apps available from Notation Central, including PDF Batch Scale, Batch Stitch, Batch Booklet, and Music Binder. Listen now:

Scoring Notes

File renaming and PDF batch utilities

Play Episode Pause Episode

Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds

00:00 / 31:09

Amazon Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Pandora PocketCasts Podchaser RSS Spotify Stitcher TuneIn

RSS Feed

Share

Link

Embed

Name Mangler

Earlier on this blog I described how to use tokens to custom name PDFs that are created from Sibelius (the same functionality exists if you should ever need to extract parts as separate files).

But what if you receive files from someone else that are already named in a less than helpful way? Here’s a typical one I received:

Here are the things that drive me bananas (not good) that I was itching to fix:

• Files not in score order
• All caps filename and extension
• Abbreviated instrument name
• Number of pages in the filename is no longer relevant because I will be modifying the files

Enter Name Mangler. I dropped the files into the interface, dragged the files into score order, and used a few of its many powerful features, like removing characters, change case, sequence (automatically adding numbers, letters or other characters), and find & replace — all of which can be run independently or chained together in a sequence (and saved as a preset, if you like).

After clicking “Rename 30 items…” it took less than a second to tame my filenames, and you can see the resulting name in the rightmost column above (click for a larger version). Name Mangler’s simplicity belies its deep feature set and scripting options. It goes for $19 either directly from Many Tricks or on the Mac App Store.

Moom

Whenever I give a presentation using my laptop, projecting video to a screen, I inevitably have to re-size and move windows around the limited screen space, especially if demonstrating more than one file or program (like when using Sibelius and Logic at the same time using ReWire). I don’t want to take away from the flow of the presentation when doing so.

So I rely on Moom to make quick work of these tasks. With Moom installed, hovering over your window’s green button brings up options to fill the screen, use the top, bottom, left or right halves, or another size based on segments of the screen.

Custom keyboard shortcuts and saved window layouts are just a few of Moom’s deeper features. Of course, I use Moom in everyday work too, but savvy Mac users always notice it during presentations and ask me afterwards what it is. Moom is available for $10 directly from Many Tricks.