Product Reviews

Media Assistant is an asset management utility designed to store and organise media files. But while similar applications such as Extensis Portfolio (Reviews, Vol 15 No 10, p33) and Canto's Cumulus (Reviews, p29) are targeted mainly at the high-end graphics market, Media Assistant is aimed at home and small business users who simply want to quickly catalogue files and data in a format that is easily retrievable.

You import records either as a file or directly from another application by cutting and pasting. As you'd expect from a program based on Apple's QuickTime technology, Media Assistant supports most image, text and sound formats, including 3DMF, HTML and MPEG.

The program operates in two modes: as a standalone catalogue application and a drop box, or as a small floating window that sits above active applications. Files can be dropped directly into either from drag-and-drop-savvy applications, and changing between each mode requires only a mouse click. Usefully, catalogues can be password-protected and, like Cumulus and Portfolio, the program has powerful AppleScript features.

In common with most other media management utilities, file records are references to the original files rather than duplicates. By contrast, raw data (usually text or other material copied and pasted from another application) is stored directly in the catalogue.

When dropping folders onto a catalogue, you can automatically filter out files that you don't want to include, although Media Assistant's approach is more rudimentary than that available elsewhere. While Cumulus, for example, allows you to specify whether an asset should be catalogued on the basis of individual file type, Media Assistant offers the 'take it or leave it' choice of either cataloguing every file dropped onto it or just QuickTime-translatable files. Surprisingly, it defaults back to the latter option each time the program is launched.

Catalogued files can be viewed in their parent application by double-clicking on their preview icon in the Catalog window, although

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you can also specify default editing applications for images, 3D and movie files from within Media Assistant. It's quicker, however, to preview assets in the program's Viewer palette, which gives a preview of all QuickTime-compatible file types and stored data. Media Assistant automatically tracks a file's basic information as it's imported, including the asset's name and modification date, alongside its size and kind. Keywords and comments can be added in a separate viewer. It's hardly detailed, but it should be enough for most uses.

Media Assistant's focus on the casual user - the program's priorities are illustrated by its tiny RAM requirement and ability to work on older Macs - also means that it's far from the ideal solution if you're dealing with huge amounts of disparate or complex data. Although the retrieval of files is assisted by the ability to add keywords, the program lacks support for storing records in user-defined categories, so catalogues can become unmanageable unless you're prepared to store your information in separate catalogues.

Nevertheless, Media Assistant does include some features you'd only expect to find in a more expensive product. One of its most impressive abilities is its export functionality. Records can be exported to a standalone catalogue, a QuickTime movie file, or as an HTML-based Web archive, and it's possible to export images in a variety of formats, making it ideal for batch processing pictures. You can also generate a slide show, and although the program lacks the ability to generate a soundtrack, it's possible to record a sound file and link it with a record to be incorporated into the slide show so that it plays simultaneously.

The ability to export to HTML is hindered slightly by the fact that, during the conversion process, all data and QuickTime-aware items in the database - with the exception of GIF and movie files - are converted to JPEGs rather than retained in their original format. If most of your catalogue is made up of images, this won't be much of a problem, but the default compression setting isn't particularly rigorous (a 4K text clipping balloons to an 85K JPEG), so it would be handy to have an option to tweak compression levels. Non- QuickTime-aware files are simply ignored.

Such limitations mean that Media Assistant is no friend of the power user. But as an inexpensive utility that makes few demands on your system, it's ideal for simple home-use applications, such as cataloguing digital camera output. As long as you're not expecting the level of functionality apparent in more expensive media management tools, you won't be disappointed.