Review of
Media Center by JASC
by Donna Moehlich
JASC, Inc. Media Center is a multimedia file manager that works with images, photos,
sounds, and music files. It has slide show feature, format conversion, and image
manipulation.
Media Center organizes your media files so that they are easier to find and use.
There are five functions in this program to help you become more organized. Something
I really need since I am a big user of clip art and never seem to be able to find
that picture I saw two weeks ago and need now. Image viewing is easy through a double
click process. A group of media files can be played in a slide show sequence and
you can import sound. The look of an image can be altered through Paint Shop Pro
another very popular program by JASC, Inc. I suspect that some alterations might
also be accomplished through other drawing programs as well, but I will let the artists
out there do that. I tend to be a what you see is what you get type person as my
artistic flare has never included free hand drawing. I really like the fact that
the Media Center records the file by volume so that finding the disk or CD is made
easier. Retrieval of the source is always difficult. Hard copy cataloging lets you
print a collection of files.
The Main Window has the basic Title Bar, Menu Bar, and Toolbar with a large portion
of the window set up as a workspace for assembling your images into an album.
In order to use Media Center there are three descriptive terms that I had to familiarize
myself with in order to understand how the program works. The first is the album
or collection of thumbnail images. The second is thumbnail which are the media files.
The graphic file is a reduced version of the file's content. An animation thumbnail
displays the files first frame. An audio file displays the Icon for control of this
type of file. A media file is an image, sound and animation file.
With this knowledge I was ready to get started creating an album from the multiple
sources of clip art that I have. After selecting a new album and deciding a title
I was ready to get started.
I found that there are two ways of selecting files. There is the slow process of
picking individual files from a single directory or you can scan multiple directories.
I must say that I had some difficulty with the how to's of the process only because
I lack an understanding of DOS. I understand what BMP. and DLL. files are, but when
it comes to FLT and DAT files I do not understand them. In selecting files to go
into the album you can select sequential files or randomly select files on multiple
drives. The forming of subdirectories is helpful in narrowing the topic range of
the album.
The saving process of each album is as with any data entry utilizing save as to give
the album a title. Likewise the locating of a file is the same as with any other
Windows program. I caution you to remember that in fact your file might be a subdirectory.
A special feature allows you to merge albums together selecting the source album
and merging other albums into it. I also liked the fact that I could print in part
or whole the image files.
I believe that this program is invaluable when clip art is spread amongst many sources.
I have six CD's of different clip art and would use JASC's Media Center to help consolidate.
This program works well for organizing images and I recommend it, however, I do question
whether there is an upgrade to this program available? It might be that an upgrade
would be easier to use. I struggled in using this program only because I was using
something new and different to me with terms and abbreviations unfamiliar to me.
System Requirements and pricing: An IBM or 100% compatible 386 or higher. Windows
3.1 or higher and 4 MB of RAM. I found Media Center in the TigerDirect catalog for
$34.99.
USER GROUP EDITORS:
Articles posted in this area have been cleared for publication in your newsletters.
We do encourage you to contact the author for additional details and/or updates.
Please ALWAYS credit the original author!