Farallon’s ScreenRecorder revolutionized training by making it easy to record on-screen work sessions — but something was missing. There was no way to edit a sequence, no way to add notations to a picture, no way to make a sequence interactive, and no way to turn a sequence into a double-clickable application. MediaTracks solves all these problems.
Making Tracks. The first task in creating a MediaTracks presentation is to record a screen sequence by activating the ScreenRecorder DA, which is included. A small control panel reminiscent of a VCR’s appears. Click on the Record button, and you're prompted to name the tape. The panel shrinks to a small tape icon in the comer of the screen, and you can begin recording. Perform whatever action you want to record, and click on the tape icon to stop. When the control panel reappears, you can replay or rerecord your tape. If you have a large screen, you can shrink the recording area to a standard 9- or 13-inch size.
To edit a rough tape, launch the MediaTracks application and open the tape: you're then presented with a window that looks like a window in SoundEdit, MacRecorder’s sound-editing software.
As you watch the tape, pressing a screen button (or m for mark on the keyboard) puts an edit point onto the tape, creating clips. Each clip can have its own name, sound, graphics, and actions. The clips can be rearranged, and every clip can also have an action attached to it.
To add a sound to a clip, just select the desired clip and click on the Record Sound button. You're prompted to either record the sound with MacRecorder or to import a previously recorded sound. If the sound is longer than the clip, you can pause (at the beginning or the end of the clip) for the sound to finish before resuming playback or it can overlap the next clip. The MediaTracks Record Sound dialog box tells you how long the recorded sound should be (depending on memory, sampling rale, and compression) and how long the selected clip is. (You can also select multiple clips.)
You can add simple color overlay graphics to a clip by double-clicking on a clip to bring up the drawing window. Here you can use typical MacDraw-like objects (text, lines, rectangles, rounded rectangles, and ovals) to annotate what’s happening in the clip.
Another tool in the drawing window is the button tool, the real key to MediaTracks' power. You use it to define onscreen buttons, so you can have a clip pause and wait for a user action such as the press of a button and then branch to another clip in the tape or even to a completely different tape.
Buttons can also play sounds and control tape playback (pause, stop, skip, and so on). Farallon includes an XCMD that lets you play MediaTracks tapes from HyperCard. To help mesh MediaTracks with HyperCard, MediaTracks sends HyperCard messages when MediaTracks buttons are pressed or when clips begin.
Unlike ScreenRecorder, which requires that all users have the application to play back tapes, MediaTracks gives you several options. The MT-Player program can be distributed without charge (noncommercially, or commercially with Farallon’s permission) for opening, playing, and pausing tapes. You can also save tapes as stand-alones. Tapes saved in this way have MT-Player built in, so you end up with a double-clickable application.
Minor Faults. MediaTracks’ few faults are minor. First and foremost, it doesn’t record on-screen color (even though you can paste color goodies into its draw layer), so you’ll want to change your screen to black-and-white while you’re recording. Although the 246-page indexed manual is great, there are some inconsistencies in the tutorial section that can be confusing. The MediaTracks editor lacks a frame counter (actually a QuickDraw-command counter), which would make it much easier to find a particular location on a tape or clip. (You can, however, single-step through a tape or clip.) Reusing sounds just duplicates the audio data, taking up extra disk space; pointers would’ve been much more efficient. Although the program works fine on normal Mac displays, it did have some problems with my RasterOps ColorBoard 108. Finally, if you have a large screen, you have to reboot to change the recording-screen size and reboot again to reclaim your expensive screen real estate.
MediaTracks is available in a software-only version ($295) for those who already have a MacRecorder; it is also available with a MacRecorder in the Multimedia Pack, which costs $495. If you already have ScreenRecorder, you can upgrade to MediaTracks for $50 (or $250 if you want a MacRecorder). By the time you read this, Farallon should also be delivering MediaTracks on a CD-ROM disc.
The Bottom Line. In MediaTracks, Farallon has created another great communications tool. It is a revolutionary program that is easy to learn, powerful, and versatile — everything we expect a Macintosh product to be.
Hipschman, Ron. (December 1990). MediaTracks. MacUser. (pgs. 62, 64).
Farallon Computing, Inc.
Applications
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2021-11-29 / 
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MediaTracks.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
