MetaEditor
Description and Download

Description | Requirements | Download
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Description and Background

Editing digital media is tedious work. To help you find clip start and end times, freeware MetaEditor creates and edits RealSystem metafiles and can use them to produce new media clips. It offers several time-saving tools to help content developers who edit and index digital audio and video files encoded with RealSystem™ RealProducer (G2) or RealEncoder (earlier releases) to...

• create, edit, and manipulate .RAM metafiles based on segments of any version of RealAudio® and RealVideo® clips
• use the RealNetworks RMEditor application to edit clips via a graphical front-end

Since the G2 system supports various additional formats via plugins, MetaEditor can also be used to index .WAV, .AVI and .MPG files. MetaEditor is programmed in Visual Basic 5 and runs under Windows 9x. (Compatibility with the various releases of Windows NT, 2000 and XP has not yet been established please let me know about your experiences.)  There may also be incompatibilities with some formats of RealNetworks release 8. The awful truth:  due to other commitments, MetaEditor has not been updated since February 1999. When and if time permits, it will be updated to ensure compatibility with current versions of RealProducer and Windows.  

View screenshots of MetaEditor.

The programmer has developed this application to response to his team's needs for a tool to index audio and video files rapidly and accurately and to limit the effort and frustration required to combine and edit them. The specific purposes for which the program was developed are editing and indexing digital audio and video files for language learners. He is making MetaEditor available so that others can benefit from this work. He...

• is affiliated with RealNetworks only as a member of the RealDeveloper program
• provides this application free of charge, but without any guarantee or liability for its performance or continued development
• requests that MetaEditor not be redistributed without his permission

Notice

MetaEditor is freeware, not a commercial product. It is a tested, stable utility program originally intended for in-house use by knowledgeable content developers. Consequently, users are expected to understand what they need to do and why, and to be able to proceed with minimal documentation or technical support. While there are many safeguards built into the program, it is not idiot-proof. For example, .RAM files are expected to conform to certain narrow format guidelines, all files specified therein are expected to be present on a local drive, etc. Deviations from these expectations can lead to unexpected but non-destructive results (e.g. not all information may load properly, or an edit action may fail, but your original files will always remain intact unless you have approved an overwrite).

Requirements and Limitations

MetaEditor requires Windows 95/98/ME, and should run without problems on any computer that runs these operating systems well. The current version of this evolving program can be downloaded below. (Tip: you can both jump to this page and send the programmer e-mail address directly from the "Help" > "About" dialog box in the application. If you register via this option, you will be informed about future changes as they are implemented.) In addition, the following applications from RealNetworks must be installed on the user's system:

• RealPlayer™ G2 is required to index RealMedia files; MetaEditor will not work without the ActiveX object C:\Windows\System\Raoc3260.dll -- earlier versions of RealPlayer do not support playback with MetaEditor.
  download RealPlayer or RealPlayer Plus
  
• RMEditor, included with RealProducer, the free successor to RealEncoder.
  Required to edit RealMedia files; indexing alone can be done without RMEditor installed.

All Help and documentation for the program is provided in HTML-files installed along with the application. A webbrowser is required to read them.

Limitations and "Known Issues"

• Cut and paste. When pasting clips together from different files, MetaEditor presumes that the files are encoded identically and that all mediastreams in the clip are to be copied; it does not merge or separate mediastreams. Since it relies on the RealNetworks RMEditor application, not all copy, cut and paste operations will yield satisfactory results. In particular, if video is cut between "key frames", any audio will be heard from the cut point, but the video image will not appear until the next key frame. The programmer has also noted various quality issues while editing video. For best results with video, heed RealNetworks' advice and perform all editing on the video sourcefile before encoding to RealMedia. In contrast, audio editing with this tool has always been successful for the programmer.
• Networks and Read-only drives. If you have loaded a clip from a CD-ROM or from a network drive on which you do not have write or directory creation privileges, clips are saved by default in a subdirectory of the MetaEditor program folder; you may specify another destination folder. Beware: Network error messages may be misleading. For example, my network protests that I don't have the appropriate permissions to create a directory or write a file when I specify a name longer than 8 characters, but it proceeds silently when it the name is shorter. This application was not designed to be run from a network drive, but I would like feedback about your experiences using MetaEditor with media files on network drives.

Download and Installation

• Download MetaEditorSetup.exe (1.9 MB) and save it to a known location (Desktop is easiest to find).  Please be patient -- this is a large file and my ISP can be very slow at times (it's the best I can afford for freeware!)
• Double-Click on MetaEditorSetup.exe to install MetaEditor. This may entail updating of additional system files and restarting Windows before continuing with the installation process. Do not be concerned by the spurious error message "Cannot write to the destination file!" Setup should succeed anyway.
• During installation, a shortcut to MetaEditor will be placed on your Start Menu under Programs. The default path to the program, help and media clip files is C:\Program Files\MetaEditor.
• If you have already downloaded a previous version of MetaEditor, download only the updated program and documentation files MetaEditorUpdate.zip and unzip them to folder C:\Program Files\MetaEditor. If you prefer to reinstall the entire application with MetaEditorSetup.exe, please uninstall MetaEditor first via Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs.

You are encouraged to register to receive MetaEditor update news (no cost, obligation, or Spam™), or else to request below that NetMind inform you of changes to this page.

Acknowledgements
The programmer gratefully acknowledges the use of the Common Controls Replacement Project's DragList and Extended File Common Dialog controls in this project, and the help of numerous fellow developers through their websites and newsgroup postings.

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