Exporting to Separate Folders in Reaper 📂
When using Reaper for sound design, it can be extremely useful to be able to export files to separate folders on your disk. This is something that can save a lot of time in a variety of situations, such as if you're working on a game or a sound library.
For my earlier sound libraries which were made in Cubase, I had to spend a lot of time manually creating and naming folders, a process which can be eliminated using Reaper.
As an example, I made a few tracks for footstep sounds. In Reaper, I arranged the tracks to resemble how I want to sort the exported files on disk.
So we have:
SFX
Footstep
Brick
Wood
I kept to a simple set of folders here, but you could just as easily apply this method to a much larger hierarchy of files, which is a situation where it can be a major time-saver to do this.
Next I'll select of the individual audio clips.
We can now go to the Render window.
I'll set "Source" to "Selected media items".
You should set the "Directory" field to wherever you want the root folder of the exported files to be. For simplicity, I'll set it to my Desktop in this case.
Next we'll need to fill in the file name with the naming scheme that we want to use.
The full text I'll use in the "File name" field is the following:
$folders\$track\$folders[_]_$track_$itemnumber
I'll break that down it to sections to make it a bit clearer what that means!
The "$" that appears several times in that is what Reaper uses to add "Wildcards". These allow you to automate certain parts of the name based on a particular type data, depending on which wildcard you use.
For example, typing $folders causes Reaper to replace the wildcard with the names of each of the selected item's parent tracks. By default, these are separated by a backslash, which is also the symbol you can use to automatically add folders when exporting. We can also manually add a backslash to add folders ourselves.
The $folders wildcard doesn't include the name of the track that the selected item is on, but I'd like this to be present in this case, so I'll also add a backlash, followed by the $track wildcard and another backlash. So with the text "$folders\$track\", we'll end up with files being placed in folders based on the folder structure within Reaper.
Next we'll want to decide how the files themselves are named.
I'd like to also include the folder structure within the names of the files because this makes it clear what the sound is, so I'll use the $folders wildcard again. This time however, I'll type $folders[_] instead. The square brackets are used to type a custom separator character to be used between each folder name. So instead of "SFX\Footstep", typing $folders[_] results in "SFX_Footstep".
As before, we'll also want the file name to include the name of the track that the selected audio clip is on, so we'll add _$track after the second $folders wildcard.
At this point you might notice that Reaper has automatically added numbering to the exported files, which happens when the export would result in multiple files with the same name. To change the numbering format of this to be more consistent with the rest of the file name, I'll add this myself by typing "_$itemnumber".
Now you can click "Render" and you should find that all of your files are correctly sorted into folders on your disk!