Media Cleaner has always been the Swiss Army knife of multimedia production, offering unparalleled batch processing, file conversion, and compression options for audio, video, and stills. With Media Cleaner Pro 4.0, Terran Interactive has created what may be the most important compression tool on the market. The work that went into this version of Media Cleaner was mostly behind the scenes in the number of sources and output formats that it can handle, faster compression speed, new audio compression filters, and a handful of other widgets.
Speed is probably one of the most important qualities in a compression utility, and Media Cleaner just keeps getting faster. Using the Sorenson Developer Edition 1 compression codec on a 2-minute file, Media Cleaner Pro 4 was almost 9 percent faster than version 3. Compressing that same file with the new Sorenson Developer Edition 2 codec was 20 percent faster than before. In fact, there seems to be a 5 to 10 percent improvement in speed regardless of which codec is used. Added up, that can save a lot of time on large projects.
Media Cleaner now supports significantly more formats for video, stills, DV, animation, and audio. The program can read 29 different formats and write 20. New to version 4 is output support for QuickTime 4 Streaming, RealSystem G2, Windows Media (ASF), Video for Windows (AVI), and MP3 audio. Media Cleaner can now also perform lossless format conversions. If you want to turn an AVI or ASF file into a QuickTime movie, Media Cleaner can convert the data without any additional compression. Of course, it can still handle all the formats supported in previous versions, including DV The one glaring omission is that Media Cleaner still doesn’t handle CMYK images.
Audio has traditionally been Media Cleaner’s weakest area, but Terran has corrected this by offering a new suite of audio filters and MP3 support. The filters mainly reduce noise in an original audio signal so the compressed signal can be cleaner. New filters include High And Low Pass, Noise Gate, Noise Removal, Notch, Reverb, and a dynamic range compression tool.
Fans of the MP3 format will definitely want to use Media Cleaner 4 to rip tracks. Terran has included the Fraunhofer IIS MP3 encoder, one of the best encoder technologies ever developed. A 5-minute track, compressed at 16K per second, in 44KHz stereo, took seven minutes to compress and was indistinguishable from the original CD track. Even complex orchestral pieces maintained incredible fidelity to the originals.
Two new features that will also please heavy users of Media Cleaner are its helper applications and its improved support for AppleScript. Media Cleaner Pro 4 offers a new HelperApp menu. Place applications like a QuickTime Player or an alias to a RealPlayer G2 in the HelperApp folder, and these items appear in the menu. If you need to set new in and out points quickly in a movie, just select the movie in the batch and QuickTime Player from the menu — this opens the file in QuickTime Player for editing. You can also place AppleScripts in the HelperApp folder: This lets you add special actions — for example, you can select a script that will automatically send a completed movie to an FTP server. Media Cleaner is now much more AppleScript friendly, so users can set up watch folders and render farms without much effort.
There are too many small changes in Media Cleaner Pro 4 to list, but collectively, they add up to a very impressive tool for delivering media to CD, DVD, or the Web. There really is no competition for Media Cleaner, and it is well worth the purchase or upgrade price.
Sanchez, Rick. (November 1999). Media Cleaner Pro 4. MacAddict. (pg. 72).
Terran Interactive
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
6 / 
2020-09-13 / 
2024-10-01 / 
2e59eb0aea62eda2ceaca61d455bb556722aa545 / 
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Media_Cleaner_Pro.img_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
