Touchups — By Folder

The By Folder sub-tab turns Touchups into a quiet background process. Tell Librarian to watch a folder, set the Touchups options that should apply to it, and click Activate. From that moment on, any audio file that lands in that folder is automatically added to your library and scanned with the settings you defined — no manual Apply needed. Disable monitoring just as easily when you don't need it any more.

By Folder is built around the idea of cards. Each card is one rule: one folder, with one set of Touchups options. You can have as many cards as you like; each watches its own folder with its own settings. A station might run one card on its VoiceTracks folder with SteadyCast™ in Voice mode, another on the Music folder with SteadyCast™ in Music mode, and a third on a shared network drop folder where new commercials arrive throughout the day.

Anatomy of a Card

Each card on the By Folder sub-tab contains everything needed to define one monitoring rule:

Title — Set automatically from the folder name once you pick one. Gains (Active) appended whenever monitoring is running.
Folder — The path Librarian is (or will be) watching. Click Browse… to pick it.
Also apply to all sub folders — When ticked, Librarian also scans files arriving in any subdirectory of the chosen folder. Off by default.
Silence Trimming — Same controls as the By Selection tab: Start/End/Both radios and an Aggressiveness slider.
SteadyCast™ (loudness leveling) — Voice/Music radios and a target LUFS slider.
Activate / Disable — In the bottom-right corner. The button doesn't appear until the card has a folder picked and at least one feature checked. While running, it reads Disable.
− and + — Remove this card, or add a new blank card below it.

Setting Up a Card

Click + on an existing card to add a new one (or use the placeholder card that's already there on first launch).
Click Browse… and pick the folder you want Librarian to watch.
Decide whether subfolders should be included by toggling Also apply to all sub folders.
Configure Silence Trimming and SteadyCast™ independently — pick one, both, or neither.
Click Activate. The card's title gains "(Active)" and the status bar confirms the new monitor is running.

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Activate also runs a catch-up scan on the folder. Any audio files already inside that aren't yet in your library get added and Touchups-scanned right then, so you don't have to remember which files arrived before you set up the rule.

While a Card Is Active

An active card is soft-locked — every input is greyed out so you can't accidentally change a setting mid-batch and have new files scanned with mixed rules. The folder field, the recurse checkbox, the Silence and Volume options, the sliders, the radios — all of them stay visible but uneditable. Only the title and the Disable / − / + buttons remain interactive.

Whenever a new audio file appears in the watched folder, Librarian:

Adds it to the library (the library.tsv) if it isn't already there.
Runs the card's configured Touchups operations on it.
Saves the resulting TrimStart, TrimEnd, LUFS, and LUFSTarget values.
Reports the scan in the status bar at the bottom of the window.

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Files that are already in the library and already have Touchups values won't be re-scanned. Only genuinely new files get processed. To force a re-scan of older files, use the Re-analyze already-scanned files option on the By Selection sub-tab.

Stopping Monitoring

Click Disable to stop watching. A confirmation sheet appears with two options:

Just stop monitoring (default) — Librarian stops watching, but every Touchups value already written for files in this folder stays in the library. Use this when you simply don't need the monitor running any more but want to keep the data.
Stop monitoring and Remove Touchups — Librarian stops watching and clears TrimStart, TrimEnd, LUFS, and LUFSTarget for every file in the folder. Use this when you've changed your mind about a folder rule and want to roll back its effects entirely. Audio files are untouched either way.
Disregard — Cancels out of the dialog without changing anything; the card remains active.

After confirm, the card returns to its editable state — fields un-grey, Disable becomes Activate again, settings can be tweaked. Click Activate when you're ready to resume monitoring.

Overlap Detection

Librarian refuses to activate two cards covering the same ground. If you set up Card A to watch /Music with subfolders included, then create Card B pointing at /Music/Rock and click Activate on B, Librarian shows a red warning on Card B and refuses to activate it. The conflicting card's name is named in the message.

The check considers recursion in both directions: a non-recursive card on /A doesn't conflict with a recursive card on /A/B, but a recursive card on /A does. Saved-but-inactive cards may overlap freely; only activation enforces uniqueness.

Across Launches

Cards are saved to your library settings as soon as you create or change them. The next time you launch Librarian, every active card resumes monitoring automatically and runs a catch-up scan to pick up anything that arrived while the app was off. Inactive cards stay inactive — they're just remembered, not started.

Common Use Cases

Voice-track production pipeline. Point a card at the folder where your AirStaff Studio voice tracks are saved. SteadyCast™ Voice at −14 LUFS, Both ends trimmed at default Aggressiveness. Every track produced is broadcast-ready the moment it lands.
Network drop folder for commercials. Point a card at the shared folder where new commercials arrive. SteadyCast™ Voice, Both ends trimmed. Catches anything dropped in by another department or a remote contractor.
Music ingestion. Point a card at your Music folder with subfolders enabled. SteadyCast™ Music at −16 LUFS, no silence trimming (most commercial music doesn't have leading or trailing silence worth trimming). New albums dropped in are normalized automatically.
News and weather. Point a card at your News folder, SteadyCast™ Voice, Both ends trimmed aggressively. News tends to have abrupt starts and dead air after the last sentence — Touchups handles both.

How It Manifests in AutoCast

By Folder writes the same four library columns that By Selection writes — and AutoCast honors them identically, regardless of which sub-tab generated them:

Files arriving in a watched folder are automatically present in library.tsv with their Touchups values populated, so AutoCast can play them with SteadyCast™ leveling and silence trimming applied the very first time it sees them.
You don't have to remember to run a scan, click an Apply button, or do anything else for the workflow to stay current. Drop a file in, leave it alone, AutoCast does the right thing on next play.

⚠️

By Folder watches for new files only while Librarian is running. If you produce a voice track in AirStaff Studio while Librarian is closed, the catch-up scan on next Librarian launch will pick it up. But for live, immediate processing, Librarian needs to be open. Most stations leave Librarian running on the studio Mac at all times — that's the intended setup.