Siren

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 27, 2012

Scarabee Software's Siren is easy-to-use but powerful file-renaming freeware. It quickly renames, moves, or copies selected files using expressions you create. Suppose you want to rename all the images in a folder sequentially. Instead of manually renaming each in sequence, Siren can do the whole batch at once. It displays image previews and tags to help you be sure you've got the right files.

Siren is portable freeware that runs as soon as you click the program file without having to be installed or registered in Windows. When we first opened the program, a "first contact" dialog appeared with a brief but clear explanation of how it works. Siren is so easy to start up with that it practically explains itself, but an extensive Help file and online demo are available as well as an Expression Testbed tool to help inexperienced users get up to speed quickly. Siren's Explorer-style layout is clean and attractive, with a well-stocked toolbar and plenty of options, including a Wizard under the View menu. A tree view and preview pane in the left-hand sidebar made adding files easy. The preview pane is small but more than adequate for telling one file from another. Siren's Filter tool lets you filter your files by expression, file extension, and name or keyword. The program even incorporates a Favorites feature for saving and recalling expressions similar to Web site favorites.

Following the demo's example, we browsed to a folder of image files, selected a few, and then entered an expression combo. Siren offers plenty of help with this step, too, including a helpful Completion dialog jam-packed with tabbed lists of expressions ranging from Audio to Environment. Pressing the "Play" button processed our selections and activated the Undo button. When we opened the destination folder, all our checked files were present under their new names and numbering. Siren is a capable tool that will do more for you the more you use it. It's capable of making quick work of bringing order to your file chaos.

Publisher's Description

From Scarabee Software:

Siren renames, moves, and copies files using an expression. A lot of information associated to a file can be used: name, extension, dates, selection number. Other information is extracted from it according to its type: audio, video, image (standard and raw), exif, iptc, office document, pdf, html, executable, dv avi, karaoke, torrent, and url. Many different operations can be performed on character strings. A complete directory tree can be processed. Images can be viewed. For example, to change a file name to uppercase with the mp3 extension, the expression can be: %ub.mp3. Languages: English and French.

What's new in this version: Version 3.12:

Bug : File copies can remain after a failed rename operation
Bug : Crash during the "expression testbed" window opening if the "immediate recomputation" preference is set
Change in : Preferences/New name computation/Characters/Replace characters If "From" is longer than "To" the last character of "To" is used
New option in the "View" menu to specify the visualisation window placement
Expression testBed : new button to replace "current names" with the ones ... See all new features