How to automatically name file exports in Reaper using Wildcards – a great feature!

Today we are going to look at one of the reasons why Reaper excels at sample production and auto-naming files. The “wildcards” feature is one that solves file management issues and automates a lot of work that you’d otherwise have to do manually.

Wildcards are placeholders for data, so when you are exporting lots of files, you don’t have to type out the data individually.

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Let’s say you have tracks named bass, guitar, vocals, drums, and synth, and you want to export the individual stems from Reaper, you can simply select the source to render all tracks, then add the wildcard $track in the File name section.

This will automatically save each stem with the track name.

THE WILDCARDS
$project : replaces with project name
$author : replaces with project author (from Settings)
$track : replaces with track name
$tracknumber : 1 for the first track, 2 for the second… $parenttrack : replaces with parent track name
$recpass : replaces with recording pass
$year : replaces with year
$year2 : replaces with last 2 digits of the year
$month : replaces with month number
$monthname : replaces with month name
$day : replaces with day of the month
$hour : replaces with hour of the day in 24-hour format
$hour12 : replaces with hour of the day in 12-hour format
$ampm : replaces with AM or PM depending on time
$minute : replaces with minute of the hour
$second : replaces with second of the minute
$user : replaces with user name
$computer : replaces with computer name

That’s pretty simple, and other DAWs can do that too, but where they start to struggle is when you need lots of different files exported and all custom named.

Probably the main use of wildcards for me is generating lots of sample files.

If I have 100 different samples in a project (lets complicate things and say this project has different tempos throughout too), and they are all for different tracks and styles, I can use wildcards to do it.

I can name a file in the following format:

[tempo] – [instrument] – [take]

This is possible by adding wildcards. To add them, just select them from the wildcards menu and add any text (such as “bpm”) that remains constant regardless of the sample.

$tempo bpm – $track – $filenumber

We could get even more out of this if we start planning ahead too. Knowing that we can use wildcards when exporting, we may also want to group samples by their key signature.

You could either have all the tracks for a certain key signature grouped under a parent track (with the key signature as the name), or you could group them into regions (with the key signature as the name).

$tempo bpm – $parenttrack – $track – $filenumber
or
$tempo bpm – $region – $track – $filenumber

See below for a brief video overview of Reaper’s main render preset options: