This may be helpful when organizing projects that get out of hand or mods that have many unnamed or oddly named instruments .
I want a tool that renames tracks to the instrument used in it.
I can see this being helpful with certain .mods / .xm’s indeed, having names generated for empty entries, maybe the user could be able to input a standard word next to the number generation?
Joule has made a script ‘organize instruments by…’ that deals with the instrument list, can sort it by name. Maybe his code can be used, easily hacked for this request? 
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Nice one for the lazy; take the first instrument it finds in a track (as sometimes you use different instruments) and rename track.
I could easily add the feature to this tool: [Done] tag sampled instruments that aren't used (yet)
It would append the instrument number (one shot action) and also have a function for removing it. What is your preferred naming scheme? “00. Instrument name” ?
Actually the idea is for old mods which name the instruments things like their home phone numbers, addresses, short stories about how they wrote the song for a girlfriend or giving props to other groups, generally making the instrument list cluttered and confusing. It would be nice to be able to delete all that and just use simple instrument numbers instead. So not append but replace.
I know what you are talking about (modtext), but wouldn’t replacing text with instrument number be redundant? I mean, if you need to refer the instruments by their number… well… there is the instrument number column right before its name, so couldn’t you simply use that? Also, the instrument numbers can also change during song composition, and so the tool should watch for these changes in order to keep names consistent with numbers. All this work for something you already have… better to have a feature which completely deletes instrument names in my opinion
The ultimate tool would look something like this imo:
Context menu: “Instrument list / Rename instruments…”
Pops up a GUI with the following:
- A select box with preset system
- Textfield where you enter the renaming syntax.
- Tick box for “Monitor updates”, if it is at all possible to make the renaming realtime as IT-Alien suggests
- Apply button for one shot apply when the tick box is not ticked.
The syntax could be the following:
%i - the main name of the instrument (this has to be “reverse engineered” whenever the syntax is applied, in a safe manner).
%n - instrument number
%nn - instrument number with leading zero
%o - number of times the instruments have been used. not possible/practical for realtime update.
%f - the first track the instrument is being used in
%s - number of samples in instrument
%t(“V”,“S”) - type of instrument, pastes V for VSTi and S for sample based.
Any other text written in the syntax is pasted as it is.
I don’t have time for this atm, but I’m dropping it here in case someone else finds it interesting. I think it should be native really.
Meanwhile, tell me exactly what kind of naming you wanted for this time.
I’m thinking of this as a companion to the modsplitter/midi export script/sample export script or rendering as tracks, just to keep things clean and standardized when you try and work with those files later. Being able to completely delete all the instrument names in one shot would at least be a step in the right direction and could save a few minutes of fiddling around.