I haven’t really played much with Automator earlier on, but have found it to be very useful for doing small things that you would otherwise need to write a small shell script or program to do. Here is a screenshot of an Automator workflow which will add today’s date to the name of any file or folder. Very easy!

I am teaching a course in sound theory this semester, and therefore thought it was time to update a little program I developed several years ago, called SoundAnalysis. While there are many excellent sound analysis programs out there (SonicVisualiser, Praat, etc.), they all work on pre-recorded sound material. That is certainly the best approach to sound analysis, but it is not ideal in a pedagogical setting where you want to explain things in realtime.