Compressor Droplets can be extremely helpful- but recently I ran into an annoying issue with them. You can’t just drop any file on to the droplet- this is a good thing if you accidentally drop, say a text document, on to the droplet. But it’s frustrating when you can’t drop something legitimate onto the droplet.
Why won't it let me drop?
I ran into this with .caf files, a perfectly legitimate audio file, that I knew Compressor could actually handle from past experience. Whenever I tried to drop a .caf file onto a droplet to convert it to a .aif, nothing would happen. I could open up the droplet, and drag in the .caf, but what’s the point of a droplet if you can’t drop?
It turns out there is a solution. Right click the droplet and choose “Show Package Contents”. A new Finder window will pop open with all the guts of the droplet. Open up the file “Contents/Resources/Info-Stomplet.plist” in a text editor. I prefer TextWrangler, but TextEdit should work.
Next, find the line that includes “CFBundleDocumentTypes”. Under that, it will have an “array” node, and then a “dict” node. Select from that to the next “dict”, about 13 lines. Copy that, and paste right before what you had selected. Edit it as follows-
<dict>
<key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
<array>
<string>motn</string> // UPDATE to the file extension you want the Droplet to support
</array>
<key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
<string>Motion Project</string> // UPDATE to the name of the file type
<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
<string>Viewer</string>
<key>LSTypeIsPackage</key> // REMOVE if not a package
<true/> // REMOVE if not a package
<key>NSPersistentStoreTypeKey</key>
<string>Binary</string>
</dict>
Save the file. Now, open up the Terminal, which is located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. Type “touch”, and then a space. Drag the droplet from the Finder into the Terminal. The command should now say something like “touch /Users/username/Desktop/droplet.app”. Hit enter. This command reminds the application to update.
You should now be able to drag other files on to the droplet.
See? Making movies is easy.
Note that this doesn’t mean that Compressor will actually be able to use the file. It only means that you can make the Droplet try to submit it. For instance, if you try to turn an AIFF into a image sequence, that won’t work.
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