RON BELL Pear Note does what it claims it does and does that very well: You record video or audio presentations and take notes in a text field. Later, when you replay the rich media, a cursor highlights the relevant portion of your text notes. Alternatively, you can click anywhere in the text notes to immediately jump to the spot in the AV recording at which the notes were taken, enabling you to review the lecture for things you may have missed. Incredibly handy for taking notes on classes or for conducting interviews. The text editor enables notes, lists, tables, and links. The text is spotlight searchable. (It would be superb if you could search for text in spotlight and immediately jump from that to the corresponding AV, or if Pear Note could use speech recognition to take notes for you, but those are not features at this point). The program allows you to import audio and video and to add imports to existing Pear Note recordings. * If you use this software often and fail to use its export functions to later decouple text from AV (text is separately exportable as RTF or text and video is exportable as QuickTime or AAC), you'll collect lengthy AV files on your hard drive, potentially taking up significant amounts of space. This is not a problem with the program--it's simply a function of the concept. * If you record with your Mac's internal microphone rather than with an external microphone, your recording will inevitably pick up the sound of your typing, which somewhat limits the value of any AV export. * The price is a bit steep for an app if you only use this occasionally so you'll want to try the program out thoroughly first to see if it makes a useful addition to your workflow.
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