Keyboard Maestro Copy File

Quick way to copy files from a USB device

December 8, 2021 by cryan.com

Last Summer I purchased a Sony IC Recorder (ICD-UX570). Its a powerful audio recorder that saves files on the internal drive or the microSD expansion.

In order to download the audio from the recorder, I need to connect the device to the computer and drag the files from the device to my hard drive.

I decided to create a Keyboard Maestro Macro that would do that process automatically.

The Task

The task of this macro:

When the device is inserted into the computer, copy the files from the Internal 4GB memory to the ~/Music/Sony/ folder. Each audio should be in a folder with the date the recording was made.

Keyboard Maestro Macro

This is the Macro that I came up with:

Now when I insert the Sony Recorder, the files automatically get copied. I don't have to think about it. I can still move the files if I want, but I am guaranteed that a backup copy was made to the computer.

Bash Code

#!/bin/bash
cd /Volumes/IC RECORDER/REC_FILE/FOLDER01
for f in *; do
dir="/Users/cryan/Music/Sony/"$(stat -f%SB -t%Y-%m-%d "$f")
# echo $f '->' $dir
[ -d "$dir" ] || mkdir "$dir"
cp "$f" "$dir"/
done

Some Notes

This was a quick fix, using BASH. There is a better way to do this in Keyboard Maestro using a lot of the built-in actions. Next week I'll show you the "official" way to do this using Keyboard Maestro

The "pause" is needed because Keyboard Maestro works immediately when the device is connected - the file system doesn't even see it yet.