Monday, August 31, 2009

Fonts Collections: Over 31,000 Fonts (TTF, OTF, FON, AFM, PFB & PFM)

Yes, the title was not a typo, over 31K fonts for Windows XP, Vista, NT etc. There are multiple collections.

There are several collections of TrueType Fonts (*.TTF), which make up the by far largest chunk of the whole thing, plus separate collections for font formats like Open Type Font (*.OTF), Fixed Size Bitmap Fonts (*.FON), Adobe Font Metrics Files (*.AFM) and Adobe Fonts (*.PFM + *.PFB).

All in all over 1 Gigabyte (compressed) of Fonts, available for download at my Mediafire.com file share.

31KFontsCollection

Adobe Fonts Collection

4,000+ Adobe Fonts in PFx Format in font file pairs of: *.PFB Files (Type 1 PostScript Fonts) and *.PFM Files (Adobe Printer Outline Metrics Files)

PFM Files contain font metric information used by applications for laying out lines of text in a document. They also specify the Windows font menu name, kerning pair data, and a variety of other font-level information.

PFB is the Adobe Type Manager Type 1 PostScript font file format.

Adobe® Type Manager® (ATM) is a system software component that automatically generates high-quality screen font bitmaps from the PostScript® outlines in Type 1 or OpenType® format. With ATM, you can scale your fonts without the characters appearing jagged, and you can also enable "font smoothing," which further improves the appearance of your fonts onscreen by using your computer monitor's color palette to intelligently improve the rendering of characters. ATM Light also allows you to print PostScript fonts on non PostScript printers, and can be used to create custom instances of multiple master fonts.

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-PFxFntCol1.ZIP (98 MB)
  2. ROY-PFxFntCol2.ZIP (79 MB)

Adobe Font Metrics Files Collection

1,000+ Adobe Font Metrics Files in file pairs of: *.AFM (Adobe Font Metrics Files) and *.INF (Information Files)

AFM is Adobe's ASCII-based file format used for storing font metric data as human-readable data. AFM is the standard Adobe font file format.

The AFM format is also known as the Adobe Multiple Font Metrics (AMFM) and Adobe Composite Font Metrics (ACFM) file formats. In fact, AFM, AMFM, and ACFM are actually three variations of the same format. AFM files contain base or composite font information. One AFM file is used per master design of a font. AMFM files store control and global font information for a group of AFM files. And ACFM files contain the global metrics of the composite font program. AFM Specifications

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-AFMFntCol.ZIP (4.7 MB)

Bitmap Fonts Collection

Just a small collection of 87 Fixed Size Bitmap Fonts in the standard *.FON format/extension.

Bitmap font libraries, which were originally developed for the old 16 bit Microsoft Windows V3.x, but are still used in the latest Windows 32 bit version.

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. Roy-FONFntCol.ZIP (663 KB)

OpenType Fonts Collection

2,799 Fonts in OTF Format (OpenType Font Format)

OpenType fonts from Adobe is a cross-platform font file format developed by Adobe and Microsoft based on Unicode. OpenType fonts from Adobe is an extension of the TrueType SFNT format that supports PostScript font data and new typographic features. Filenames of OpenType fonts from Adobe containing TrueType data have a .ttf. or .ttc extension, while filenames of PostScript based OpenType fonts from Adobe have an .otf extension.

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-OTFFntCol1.ZIP 
  2. ROY-OTFFntCol2.ZIP 
  3. ROY-OTFFntCol3.ZIP 
  4. ROY-OTFFntCol4.ZIP

Note: Files were updated and the old links became invalid. Check this folder share to get the most recent files of this collection. You can also find other collections there that might be of interest to you.

TrueType Fonts Collections

Unlike a Type 1 font, a TrueType font consists of only one font file, a TrueType Font (TTF) file, used for both display and printing. TrueType files are installed in the operating system's Fonts Control Panel or Fonts folder. TrueType fonts are designed to display and print clearly at any point size.

PCL printer drivers send TrueType font information directly to the printer. Some PCL printer drivers enable you to send TrueType fonts to the printer as bitmapped images instead. See your printer driver documentation for instructions.

Bay Animation TrueType Fonts Collection

2,322 Fonts in the standard TTF (TrueType Font) Format. Bay Animation Fonts Collection. The fonts in this collection are only rough sorted by alphabet. Sorry.

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-BayAnimTTFFntCol.ZIP (74 MB)

Categorized TrueType Fonts Collection

5,567 TrueType Fonts (*.TTF) / Categorized (or better "somewhat sorted" by some categories like:

  • Alte Schriften (Old Fonts)
  • Arabic Fonts
  • Blood & Horror Fun Fonts
  • Comic/Cartoon Fonts
  • Curly Fonts
  • Foreign Look Fonts
  • Fun Fonts
  • Grafiti Fonts
  • Halloween Fun Fonts
  • Hebrew Fonts
  • Mono Space Fonts
  • Ornaments/Decorative Fonts
  • Seasons and Festive Greetings Fonts
  • Space Age Fonts
  • Sports Fonts
  • Vintage/Nostalgic Paper Fonts
  • Xmas Fun Fonts

... and other categories

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-CatTTFFntCol1.ZIP (98 MB)
  2. ROY-CatTTFFntCol2.ZIP (98 MB)
  3. ROY-CatTTFFntCol3.ZIP (39 MB)

SchriftenFonts TrueType Fonts Collection

5,609 Fonts in the standard *.TTF (TrueType Font) Format. "SchriftenFonts" Collection, only sorted alphabetically

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-SchriftenTTFFntCol1.ZIP (98 MB)
  2. ROY-SchriftenTTFFntCol2.ZIP (26 MB)

Big TrueType Fonts Collection

9,640 Fonts in the standard TTF (TrueType Font) Format. Unsorted, BIG Collection

Font Collection Download Link(s):

  1. ROY-BigTTFFntCol1.ZIP (98 MB)
  2. ROY-BigTTFFntCol2.ZIP (98 MB)
  3. ROY-BigTTFFntCol3.ZIP (98 MB)
  4. ROY-BigTTFFntCol4.ZIP (26 MB)

Also don’t forget my previously released:

Scene Pixel-Art Fonts Collection Volume 1.0

A collection of over 600 font sets from demos, intros, cracktros, demo makers and other sources from the Atari ST, Amiga and PC. The collection is 37 MB in size and can be downloaded from my MediaFire.com account as well.

Download the Scene Fonts Collection here:  roysac-scenefontscollectionvol1.zip

I hope you will enjoy those collection and put them to good use.

p.s. Here is the link to the Mediafire.com folder share with all my previous collections releases.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Friday, August 28, 2009

Michael Dell Gone? Dell Starts to Suck Now too!

delllogo Michael Dell, the entrepreneur who founded the computer retailer "Dell" and built it into a multi-billion dollars business must be gone from Dell. Once a poster child for customer centric marketing, web site performance enhancement making it better converting and more user friendly at the same time.

Dell computers might not be the best computers on the planet in regards to their quality, but the company always made up for it via their customer support and service.

It seems that the drive to improve on things stops after an order was placed and hopefully starts over after the computer was shipped to the customer. That is what I hope, because my experiences after I placed my order for a brand new Dell Studio XPS 16 Notebook on August 11, 2009 (17 days ago) things started to become really bad.

Michael_Dell_Founder_of_Dell_Computers Flashback

I had serious issues with my computers to say it mildly. A series of hardware failures combined with the support that I paid for but never got, because the company who purchased the business from the retailer where I bought my previous notebook went out of business, 2 weeks before my hardware problems started. After all this misfortune I finally decided to buy another Dell. I purchased multiple Dell computers in the past and was overall happy with them and the service provided, if I had a problem with the machine.

I thought that my string of bad luck had an end, when I saw that there is a great promotion available for the Dell notebook that I was interested in. 20% off the entire order. Not bad. So I started to build my computer on the Dell web site. When I was done, I decided to take advantage of the option to buy the machine on credit without paying interests for a full year. I started the qualification process, but the process started to hang. I waited 10 or so minutes and then picked up the phone to call the Dell sales department.

They were able to access my shopping cart and we continued from there.  I got qualified for Dell Preferred program and a credit line that was much higher than what I needed. The sales rep was very helpful and I even made some adjustments to the machine configuration to improve on things a bit more. Especially the "CompleteCare" Warranty was important for me to make sure that things will be taken care of quickly, should I get an issue with the machine. I told the rep that I needed a computer quickly and even changed the shipping method for my order to Next Business Day for that reason.

The rep told me that the computer should be shipped within a few business days, which I was very happy about. When we were going over the entire order one last time, I noticed that the rep mentioned an estimated delivery date of September 11, 2009. I asked about it and said that this is not an acceptable date for me. I needed a new computer yesterday and not in one month. He said that this date is unrealistic and only to cover cases like unexpected hardware shortages. My order will be fine. I said that I will take his word for it.

Calling Customer Service

Well, a week and a half passed and the only thing that I got so far is the spare battery for the notebook.

I called customer services to inquire about the status of my order. There I got told that the machine is in high demand at the moment, which explains the delay. I said to the rep that I mentioned when I placed the order that it is urgent and that he can see that, if he looks at the delivery method. Normal shipping would have been free, but I paid $69 to get it as quickly as humanly possible.

I asked if there is a way that I could get a higher priority or expedited processing. I am of course willing to pay for this special treatment. He said, that Dell does not offer such an option, but that he will see what he can do to speed up the process. He didn't say how and also avoided to give a clear answer when I asked him that.

dellhelpdesk Another Call and More Bull

This Monday, August 24, 2009 I called again, but this time not being so nice anymore, because I felt being bullshitted and lied to. Not to mention that I am still in desperate need of a new computer. The computer is the tool that I need to make my living. My livelihood depends on it so to speak. A faulty or inadequate computer reduces to disables my ability to do my work properly, in the required quality and timely fashion. The rep could not help me at all and his manager was busy. I provided my phone number to get a call back the next day (it was already evening when I called on Monday).

I did get a call back on Tuesday, but the answers by the managers were the same and he repeated one sentence over and over again. "the estimated delivery date for this order is September 11, 2009. We do our best to deliver the machine before this date." Expediting the processing is impossible. Dell uses automated processed where no human can ever interfere with. My computer is in production, which makes any change to it impossible, including cancellations. I said, great, in productions means that they should have it ready to ship in a day or two, right? No, that is not the case, but it will be delivered on or before September 11, 2009. Aha, how long can things be in production at Dell; two or more weeks? How can I imagine this "being in productions"? Is there a box with all the parts that I ordered in a box with my name on it moving slowly a countless miles long assembly line that can take two weeks to process?

Man that must be the biggest plant on the planet. There must be Billions of Dollars worth of computer equipment moving around on those conveyor belts and they must be protected by a force field and self-shooting systems or something like this, because it is impossible for any human to access those, for example to pull up to the box with my name on it, load it onto a trolley, drive down a bit closer to the assembly area and load it back up onto the conveyor belts. It must be, because I offered to pay for the man's time and everything to just do that for me, but no money in the world is probably worth the grave risk for the workers life, if he would attempt the impossible and mess with the fully automated system that Dell created.

impossible_triangle Impossible is Relative

After a lot more screaming and yelling, it was suddenly possible to cancel the entire order. Well, almost entire, because I already got some parts. Something that was impossible 15 minutes earlier, due to the current status of the order, suddenly became possible. Interesting; I wondered what other impossible things would suddenly become possible, if I would keep pushing it. But I ran out of arguments and the ones like, maybe there won't be a customer to pay back the money for the computer, if they continue to delay the delivery of the tool that the customer needs to make a living. The only option left would have been to threaten the customer service rep and make him fear for his own life and/or the life of the members of his family. I didn't want to go that far though, although I might have punched him into the face, if that would have been possible over the phone line. :(

I could also not get an answer if any other Dell system would be faster to assemble and deliver. When I asked about the in-store option via Best-Buy for example, I learned that in case of Best-Buy, Dell would not take care of the Warranty. But in the case of Wal-Mart, but my Dell Preferred account would be worthless nor would I get the discount that I got with my order (and the coupon is not valid anymore too).

I first wanted to call Dell's sales department again, but then decided not to do so. I would not expect any help from their end and only more complications. Canceling the order would probably create more issues than I already got. Getting a new computer elsewhere within such short notice without paying too much for it or buying it from somebody who might not be in business anymore to fulfill his service and warranty obligations when I need it, seems not to be a promising alternative.

sistineGod Now it is in Gods Hands

Now I am stuck, waiting for that god damn machine and hope that all my yelling and calling did maybe trigger something behind the curtain at Dell that I will receive the notebook a bit sooner than expected. Everything else is in "Gods Hands" so to speak. I hope that there is no penalty for folks like me who are agnostics.

That Dell does not offer expedited processing, if a customer specifically asks for it and is willing to pay the price tag that comes with this special treatment is beyond my understanding. Moving a customer up in the queue, if he is willing to pay for it (I was willing to pay an extra $100 just for that) is not impossible to do, despite what the customer service rep was trying to make me believe. My order got stuck between orders by folks who are not in a hurry, like folks on vacation, who take things easy and let working folks who are in a hurry freely pass.  

Michael Dell? This is not rocket science and impossible to figure out. I am very disappointed about all this and only hope that the rest of Dell did not decay to the same low level, especially their technical support. I guess I am going to find out, on or before September 11, 2009... may be. :(

So long, a rather pissed off Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Retro Cracktro Remakes Collection Volume 1

I guess it is time again for another collection of mine. I was able to put the new Version 2.0 of my scene release creator batch script to good use again. It was a breeze to get it ready with this new and enhanced version of it. You should check it out as well.

This collection is a bit different and some of the hard core purist sceners will probably have something to bitch about it, like that you can only appreciate things, if you use the original software on the original hardware. Screw them.

To show younger folks how things looked back in the days, before many of the kids were even born, then you have to provide the means to access the stuff with the current technology. If they got a taste of things and like it, then they can still go through the extra length, accept the extra cost and additional time that it takes to be authentic. Why should they do that without even knowing what they can expect in return for those extra efforts? Okay, here it comes ... a

Collection of Amiga & C64 Crack Intro Remakes for Win32 & Flash

Enjoy 430 Win32 Remakes of Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64 cracktros created by the folks from the web site/project called Retro-Remakes.net

dicabribbon

Also enjoy 608 SWF Flash Remakes of Commodore Amiga cracktros that were re-created by the folks at Flashtro.com using the widely support Adobe's Shockwave technology, which your browser should support to play without any special hoops you need to go through.

 1-flashtrokef

In both cases the authors tried to recreate the original crack intros as authentic as possible. Also check out their web sites, because new intros are added constantly.

You can also provide comment to every cracktro and rate it, if you like to.

Nothing beats the originals though, but in order to be able to enjoy those on you Win32 PC, you need a C64 or AMIGA Emulator and of course the binaries of the original intros.

 

You can find links to sites where you can download original intros for the classic Commodore platforms at the Links page of my web site at RoySAC.com. Those sites typically also have resources, tips and links to the required Emulators as well to get you covered with everything that you need.

Here are some of the highlights of the Flashtro.com remakes of Commodore Amiga crack intros. If you click on a thumbnail image below, it opens a new browser window with the Shockwave/Flash file (.SWF) in it and which your browser should play back automatically (if you have a modern one).

 

Collection Download

I hope that you enjoyed those samples and got hungry for more of this. The collection spans two ZIP archives, in total almost 140 MB in size. You can download the package at the link locations below. I made them available as usual on my file share at Mediafire.com.

Mediafire.com File Share Re-Org

Things started to get a bit messy and my Demoscene related folders and files share at my Mediafire.com account, so I added an additional folder level to the overall navigation tree.

(*) Demoscene Share Root Folder

Each of those sub folders has additional sub folders, which used to be all hanging under the Demoscene share folder, which made it a bit harder to browse and look through.

     ───────── ▄ ▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄   ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄  ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄ ▄ ─────────
·R·E·L·.· ▄ ▄▄▄▄ ▀▀▀▀▀▀███ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀███ █ ███ ▀ ███ ▄▄▄▄ ▄ ·2·0·0·9·
─────────── ▄ ▄▄▄ ███ ▄▄██▀ █ ███ █ ███ █▄ ▀▀▀▀▀███ ▄▄▄ ▄ ───────────
▄▄ ███ ▄ ███ █ ███▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄███ ▄▄
▀▀▀ ███ ▀ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

Cheers!


Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Sorting Away MP3 Files into Sub Directories by Artist Name

I just published the post where I introduced the great and useful tool Bulk Rename Utility.

I first wanted to include the content of this post into that one as well, but then decided to make it a separate post instead. The introductory post of BRU was already getting long enough, especially because I included suggestions and comments to the tool itself, which I originally intended to post at the tool authors support forums. But I wasn't able to do that yet, so the post got pretty long and adding something else would just have been too much.

I had a bunch of MP3 files dumped into a folder, several hundred of them. Songs by various artists. They came from some of my old MP3 CD-ROMs that I burned, when I didn't have that many CDs (compared to today) and keeping things organized wasn't much of a concern for me.

Well, the amount of CDs grew significantly over the years, so sorting and grouping stuff became necessary to be able to find stuff. Also, the number of different music styles that I learned to enjoy increased. Mixing some of those styles is probably not such a great idea.

The Task at Hand

Anyhow, the file names followed at least some logic. They usually started with the name of the artist followed by the title of the song, separated by a hyphen or dash (-) character. Some also included the album name or release year after the song title, in parentheses or without, spaces between names and the dash separator or without, using underscores "_" instead of spaces or spaces etc. 

There were usually more than one songs per artists, sometimes only 2 or 3 (singles) and sometimes entire albums. I wanted to create folders for each artist and move each MP3 file into the corresponding directory; a problem that I could not solve with the Bulk Rename Utility yet (even though it has the option to extract ID3 meta data from MP3s and then do something with it, which I have not figured out yet).

I did not want to do it by hand, because I still have some old CDs with MP3 files flying around where I would have to repeat this task again. So I ended up writing a little DOS BATCH Script to do the work for me.

MP3 Cleanup/Sorting Batch Script

The code for this script can be found below. You can also download the code via the link below. The ZIP archive contains next to the .BAT script file also a neat little intro to promote my web site RoySAC.com hehe.

RoySAC-SortMP3FileBatchScript.zip

The batch script performs the following set of tasks:

  1. look for MP3 files in the current directory and process each one of them
  2. look for "-" in the file name (assumed to be the separator between artist name and song title)
  3. parse the file name and extract the string before the first "-", also trim trailing spaces
  4. checks if directory with that name exists
    1. If not, create the directory (with the artist name)
  5. move the current file into that directory

The source code of MP3FileSort2Dirs.bat

   1:  @echo off
   2:  :: -------------------------------------------------------
   3:  :: MP3 Cleanup/Sorting Batch Script
   4:  :: ------------------------------------------------------- 
   5:  :: 1. looks for MP3 files in current directory
   6:  :: 2. looks for "-" in file name (assumed to be 
   7:  ::    the separator between Artist Name and Song Title)
   8:  :: 3. parses string before first "-", trims trailing spaces
   9:  :: 4. checks if directory with that name exists
  10:  ::   4.1 If not, it creates it (artist name)
  11:  :: 5. moves file into the directory
  12:  :: 
  13:  :: Batch Script by Carsten Cumbrowski aka Roy/SAC
  14:  :: visit http://www.roysac.com
  15:   
  16:  setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
  17:  cls
  18:  ::only list files with extension MP3, exclude directories
  19:  for /f "tokens=*" %%A in ('DIR /A-D /ON /B "*.MP3"^|SORT /REVERSE') do (
  20:    call :PERFACTION "%%~A%"
  21:  )
  22:  echo.
  23:  echo Done!
  24:  echo.
  25:  pause
  26:  goto :EOF
  27:   
  28:  :PERFACTION
  29:  ::look for dash in file name, parse str before dash
  30:  for /F "tokens=1 delims=-" %%B in ("%~1") do (
  31:  ::trim trailing spaces from parsed string  
  32:      set str=%%~B%
  33:      for /l %%a in (1,1,31) do if "!str:~-1!"==" " set str=!str:~0,-1!
  34:  )
  35:  call :PROCFILE "%str%"
  36:  goto :EOF
  37:   
  38:  :PROCFILE
  39:  ::check of directory exists and move file
  40:  set f2="%~1"
  41:  if {%~x1}=={} (
  42:     echo %f2%
  43:     if NOT exist %f2%  MD %f2%
  44:     move "%~1*.MP3" %f2%
  45:  )
  46:  goto :EOF
  47:   

I hope you found this post and script useful. Let me know via the comments section of this blog post below.


Thanks and Cheers!


Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Processing Files, Housekeeping, Sorting and Renaming

You might notice already that the subject of organizing, sorting and cataloging files is one of my favorites. I am collecting and archiving a lot of stuff for personal reasons, so I have to spent a lot of time dealing with issues related to that. Since I am not an egoist and keep what I learn to myself, I am sharing what I learned with anybody who is interested in it or looks for options when he has to deal with exactly the same problems that I had. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

I would like to introduce you to a tool that I learned to appreciate a lot over the time. I am so happy that I found it and still have not discovered all the featured that this tool has to offer. It's name does not do it justice and only describes the basic and main purpose of it.

This post has 2 parts. The first part is an introduction of the tool and the highlighting of some of its features. The second part has suggestions for the tool authors, problems that I found and a work-around for each of those problems that you might find helpful, if you happen to have the same problem that I had as well. You can jump directly to the second part of this post via THIS LINK: Jump to the Suggestions.

Bulk Rename Utility by Jim Willsher

It is called "Bulk Rename Utility" (available at BulkRenameUtility.co.uk) and was written by Jim Willsher from the United Kingdom. People are trying to sell tools for $15 to $50 that offer only a fraction of the features that BRU has in store and cost a lot less than all of those, a lot less. It is free, which is hard to beat by any means. However, donations are appreciated. I donated $20 myself, because I think that it is a great tool, which made my life a lot easier. Although I actually did donate money, what most cheap ass people out there would not do, ever, I am feeling guilty a little bit, because I know that the value of the tool for me is much higher than lousy $20.

There are 32bit and 64bit versions of the tool available for download at their web site.

The tool has so many features that it is almost impossible to explain them all. It definitely goes beyond the scope of my blog posts, which says quite a bit, considering the average length of my posts hehe.

I will highlight a few. As I said, I have not discovered all that the tool has to offer myself. I just found out during the background research for this post that there is also a command line version of BRU, which I downloaded of course and will check out later. The tool also has an excellent documentation and also a build-in help, which beats many commercial tools in quality as well. Then there is also the support forums, which has hundreds of threads, where you might be able to find answers to your questions or ask a question yourself, if you could not find what you need.

The tool supports "Regular Expressions", which by itself makes it already very powerful. But RegEx is not simple, even with the excellent documentation and easy to understand examples that are provided in the tools documentation. That's why there are many pre-configured options, which make the tool look confusing, if you are using it for the first time. But that is only at first glance.

BRU-Options BRU has Various Extended Options
BRU allows the customization of several behaviors of the tool and change of the layout. Options that are not enabled by default, which I suggest to enable after you installed the tool:
  1. Enable "Logical Sorting" (sort 1,2,10 instead of 1,10,2)
  2. Enable "Group Affected Files", which makes it easier to verify the results before hand, if not all files or folders are affected by the selected renaming rules.
  3. Enable "Prevent Duplicates". If the renaming of two files would result in the same file name, "_2" is added to the second file or "_3" etc., if a file with that alternative name already exists as well.

It looks confusing, because of the many options of the tool that are configurable directly from its main dash board. The dashboard is segmented into numbered blocks. Each block represents a specific type of renaming tasks that users usually want to perform. Putting each of them in a separate screen is probably not a possible alternative solution for this "overload" problem, because you can utilize the options from multiple "blocks" at the same time. One option could be to hide the detailed options of any block, which is not active and only show the ones that were selected/are active. I don't know. Maybe it would be worth a try.

There is a simple rule, ignore all "blocks" where the font color of the title of the block is black instead of the "active" color, which can be configured via the Options menu. The default color is "red', so if it isn't red, don't worry about it, because it does not do anything yet.

BRU-FixCase-FoldorFiles-Title

Here is a screen shot of a very simple, but common renaming task that you might want to perform. Although file names in NTFS (Windows) are not case-sensitive, proper cases do help visually and simply look more clean than file or folder names ALL UPPER-CASE or lower-case.

Block 4. "Case" provides options to change what the block title already suggests, the "case" of names. You can change names to all upper or lower case of course, or use the more eye friendly option of changing the case to either "Title" or "Sentence". The "Title" option does not produce a capitalization that conforms to the rules of the English language, if you expected that. I actually wrote once a well received article that explains those rules.

It simply means that the first letter of EVERY word in the file name is changed to upper-case, versus "Sentence", where only the first letter of the first word of the file name is changed to upper case and everything else to lower-case of course.

BRU-MoveFilesSubFold-DirPre

One feature that I discovered pretty late and wished to have found out earlier is the ability of BRU to move or copy files in bulk as well. I sometimes have the case, where I have many files in tons of sub directories, where I would like to move all of those files to a flat single directory instead.

I used to use a tool called XXCOPY in the past, which did this specific job, but it was cumbersome to use, because it requires several command-line options to be used to get the desired effect. Getting them wrong could also cause results that you did not intend. A mess that might be hard to get out of, which is a good time to mention that BRU has the ability to "revert" or "undo" the previous rename execution, if you made a mistake in the rules and realized your mistake after you executed the renaming already.

But BRU also has an option that XXCopy does not have, which is great. You can add the name of the sub-folder(s) where the file is located to the file name that you want to move as well. You can make it a prefix or suffix and specify the character that you would like to use to separate the folder name(s) from the original file name. You can include just the immediate parent folder name or the parent of the parent and the parent etc. There is no limit of levels that you can append. This is really useful, if you have a file with the same name in tons of descriptive sub folders and want to move all of them to a single and flat folder.

BRU Windows Explorer Extension
The option to add Bulk Rename Utility as custom extension to the folder context menu in Windows Explorer comes in very handy, increasing the usability of the tool 100 times fold, because the selected folder will also be selected by BRU by default.
BRU-ExplorerFolderExtension

Bulk Rename Utility has an Import Option as well, which lets you provide a text file with old name/new name pairs, separated by "|" to be processed by BRU. Why would you want to use BRU instead of renaming the files already when you create the input file itself?

Well, that is not always possible, because of permissions that might be missing, requiring a different user account to actually do the renaming. Furthermore, one thing I did not mention before, which is also important IMO. Bulk Rename Utility is FAST, really fast. How don't know how they do it, but it beats every alternative option that I tried so far, including command line options from Windows itself or a custom VBScript or Batch script that I wrote myself or downloaded from the Internet.

Those were just a few features and options of Bulk Rename Utility. There are a lot more. There is something for extracting ID3 tag and ExIf meta data from MP3 and image files, but I have not figured out how that works exactly.  This is also the only option that I found so far, where the documentation is a little bit too short and not sufficient to explain how to make use of this feature. I enabled it and looked at MP3 files with BRU and no obvious change was visible to me in the interface. They might want to include some practical examples for how to make use of those meta data extraction features.

I suggest to download the tool and play with it yourself to find out all the other nice things that you can do with it.  As I mentioned already, this tool is free. No, not a free trial or a limited free edition to up-sell people to the fully functional "PRO" version. All features are enabled and there is no limitation in use or time of use of the program. This said, I also would like to repeat, that donations are appreciated by the author. It's a great time saving tool and worth giving the author some money in return for his efforts to create this tool for you and me.

Suggestions for BRU

I signed up at the support forums for BRU, but it requires an admin to enable my account manually first, before I am able to post to their forum for suggestions. Since I hate to wait, I decided to include those suggestions in my post and then refer to it from the forum, once I have the permission to post there.

I also included a work-around for each issue that I found, so none of the problems of BRU that I found so far could not be solved by using BRU itself as well.

Replace Accented Characters

BRU Option Block 5 (Remove) / Checkbox "Accents"

This option replaces French, German accented characters with English ones in the name of the selected files and/or folders. This is a nice and good option, but a little bit flawed when it deals with the special German characters (see grid below).

List of Special German Language Characters

Character DOS ASCII

ISO 8859-1

HTML Named HTML Chr
ä 132 228 ä ä
ü 148 252 ü ü
ö 129 246 ö 
Ä 142  196 Ä Ž
Ö 153 214 Ö Ö
Ü 154 220 Ü Ü
ß 225 223 ß ß

      
The accented German letters based on the English letters oau or OAU should be replaced with oe, ae, ue, Oe, Ae and Oe (2 characters). That is the official way of converting those German characters to Latin.

The Szett character "ß" is not considered by BRU at all, although it is also not an accented character. It is also called "sharp s" or "ess-zed". However, it is also not replaced or removed via the other options, e.g. Symbol and High ASCII character removals.

Correct would be the replacement with "ss", no upper-case version, because the letter Szett can by definition NEVER be the first character in a word, ever.

Work-Around:

A work-around to this incorrect handling of special German characters would be by using the Character Translation (CTRL-F6) feature of BRU instead of the option Block 5 (Remove) / Checkbox "Accents". There is only one problem with this work-around though. The feature does not save the settings nor provides any option to save and load them as needed. Adding this option does make a lot sense to me.

The Character Translation feature uses ISO/IEC 8859-1 ASCII character codes and not DOS, which took me a moment to find out :). You can also use the characters itself, but does not work for special characters for example. There you must use the ASCII code instead. The translation works straight forward. One translation per line. Each translation is a pair of "old character(s)" and "new character(s)", separated by "=". Individual characters on each side of the "=" are separated by comma (,).

Here are the settings for the accurate replacement of special German characters with English ones.

228=a,e
252=u,e
246=o,e
196=A,e
214=O,e
220=U,e
223=s,s

Change Case to "Title" Type/Style

The "Title"-Type "Case" change works pretty well, although it could also be improved by adding some additional smart logic. When I cleaned up my MP3 collection, I noticed that abbreviations like "DJ" or "MC" are changed to "Dj" or "Mc". Okay, it does not do it, if the proper punctuation would be used, e.g. "D.J." or "M.C.", but who is doing that actually?

The rules in those cases would be:

If word = "DJ" (beginning or end of string or preceded and followed by punctuation characters), leave it upper-case. Same logic for MC.

On the other hand, McDonald is changed to Mcdonald. The rule would be, if word starts with Mc, followed by an upper-case Letter (A-Z), leave it. Those rules could be enabled or disabled via a configuration option, to be flexible. Those rules apply to the English language and might not somewhere else.

Fixing incorrect Case via Character Translation

Again, the Character Translation feature can be used as a work-around/fix for the mentioned problems.

D,j,032=D,J,032
032,M,c,032=032,M,C,032

This fixes any instances of Dj followed by a SPACE/BLANK character, changing it to "DJ"+SPACE. If another character than SPACE is following the word "DJ", the translation would have to be modified. If you use the under score "_" character instead of the SPACE for example, replace the instances of "032" with "_" and use that translation instead. Similar logic is used to fix the misspelled "Mc", with the exception that it also requires a leading SPACE also. I added that as safeguard, because "MC" is (almost) never used at the beginning of the name (except for MC Hammer, which just came to my mind while I was writing this hehe).

In the case of McDonald etc. To fix the incorrectly renamed files/folders, use the following character translation maps. There is no easy way to indicate  "any lower-case letter" or "change to upper-case", so I had to specify a translation for each case individually.

032,M,c,a=032,M,c,A
032,M,c,b=032,M,c,B
032,M,c,c=032,M,c,C
032,M,c,d=032,M,c,D
032,M,c,e=032,M,c,E
032,M,c,f=032,M,c,F
032,M,c,g=032,M,c,G
032,M,c,h=032,M,c,H
032,M,c,i=032,M,c,I
032,M,c,j=032,M,c,J
032,M,c,k=032,M,c,K
032,M,c,l=032,M,c,L
032,M,c,m=032,M,c,M
032,M,c,n=032,M,c,N
032,M,c,o=032,M,c,O
032,M,c,p=032,M,c,P
032,M,c,q=032,M,c,Q
032,M,c,r=032,M,c,R
032,M,c,s=032,M,c,S
032,M,c,t=032,M,c,T
032,M,c,u=032,M,c,U
032,M,c,v=032,M,c,V
032,M,c,w=032,M,c,W
032,M,c,x=032,M,c,X
032,M,c,y=032,M,c,Y
032,M,c,z=032,M,c,Z

Amiga File Names and Extensions

I dealt quite a bit with files that were originating on the Commodore Amiga computer, mainly tracker modules. The Commodore Amiga did not use file extensions as MS DOS did. It identified the type of file by examining the header of it to then enable special options and features for it. Similar to what Windows is doing nowadays (optional in Windows XP) in addition to use traditional file extensions, which unfortunately stayed with us to this day and are the cause of many problems, due to the abuse by hackers, who get unsuspected users to execute malicious code, because they thought that the executable is a document (thanks to the feature of Windows to hide file extensions for known file types).

Anyhow, something like file extensions was adopted by Amiga users to identify the type of file by including a descriptor in the file name itself. However, they typically added the descriptor as a prefix instead of a suffix, which would then be interpreted as an extension, if transferred to a PC. Tracker modules for example are often named "mod.module name" etc.

When transferred to a PC, Windows will assume that "module name" is the extension.

BRU has some options to do something with file extensions, but I did not find an easy one for this particular problem. There is a way, which involves the use of regular expressions.

Here is what you have to do:

  1. Block 1 (RegEx): 
    Match: ^([a-zA-Z0-9]{1,4})(\.)(.*)
    Replace: \3.\1
    Check Option: Include Ext. (important)
  2. Block 11 (Extension):
    Select "Remove"
  3. Select files to rename and then press "Rename"

BRU-AmigaPrefixToWinExt

A new option for the Block 11 (Extensions) that would do this would be nice. What would be a good name for it? Mhh. "swap" maybe.

I hope that you find this post useful and that it was able to solve a problem that you had or might do so in the future. Let me know in the comments section of this post below. Thanks.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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