Thanks to guys at Jasc we're giving away 2 copies of Media Center Plus 3, 'The smart way to organize, manage, publish and share multimedia files'. Congratulations to Karen Stenlund from the USA and David Dyet from Canada!

Product: Jasc Media Center Plus 3
Web Site: http://www.jasc.com/mcp3.html
Purchase: here
Review by: The KROW

It's a dilemma. Working on the computer and before you know it, your favorite media is strewn all over your hard drive.

You know how it goes. That image of your favorite computer chair you wanted to email friends, somehow got stuck in your "Windows System32" file. Or the .avi of someone throwing a temper tantrum in the office, which you wanted to use as a screen saver is in your "My Stuff" folder along with junior's homework docs, and gramma's "garage sale" flyer. And it's only natural that cool animated gif you made for web, is hiding  in an Excel directory. (we won't get into the 10 megs of cool wavs and midis which wouldn't fit on one floppy so they're now stored on a "library" of floppies). Like I said...it's a dilemma.

Your Computer Gives You So Much. Give Something Back!

After developing digital media for years, and having been a fan of JASC's Paint Shop Pro for equal time, it was a "gift to my hard drive" when I discovered another product of JASC's called Media Center Plus.

As the name implies, "Media Center" does exactly what it says...."Makes Everyone's Digitals Immediately Accessible" and becomes the "Center" of all your media files, " Plus" gives you a place to show them off for free!! With this little gem, I no longer do the infamous "Find" for my files, sharing files is a snap, and creating albums is a real time saver! With Media Center you can:

• Capture and Interface (even with digital cameras)
• Catalog & organize with your own keywords and URLs (very cool)
• Publish entire "albums" and run slideshows
• Link right to your fav editing programs and play your custom made albums as a screen saver (very cool!)

Easy as 1, 2, 3.... and you can skip the 3!

Media Center is based on "albums". From the minute you install Media Center, you begin creating "albums" with little or no help from the Guide Book (comes included with the boxed version. Can you believe it? Someone out there still makes good old fashioned Guide Books in a printed form? This is another "Plus" for those who already have "eleventy-million" programs open and don't need another to read "how to's"!  And frankly, as we all know, entire Guide Books made like that are simply a "Pain Directly where one Falls").

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A Look At Media Center's Interface...
(and Mr. I. B. Cool's too)

Unlike programs where you are bombarded by toolbars, buttons and palettes when you open them, Media Center starts out clean and simple. Get working in it, and it stays organized! Probably the greatest feature is the thumbnail display. Open any album, and Media Center shows "thumbnails" of every item in that album. And better still, YOU can adjust the size of the thumbnails (yea! no more squinting at framed "blobs")!

The KROW's custom made Media Center Album

Media Center shows you jpgs and gifs, but it even uses place holders for non-graphical files such as wavs. You can consider Media Center as a "one-stop-shop" for all your media file access needs!

"Match-Maker, Match-Maker...."

Before working with the program, I was concerned I would have another piece of software which wouldn't "match up" with all the file formats I needed. Fortunately, the clever folks as JASC saw this problem before I did. They made Media Center Plus to support more formats than ever before! You might even catch some you've never heard of including:

• Photo & Image Formats - bmp, cdr, cgm, clip, cmx, ct, cut, dcx, dib, drw, dxf, emf, eps, fpx, gem, fig, hgl, iff, img, jif, jpg, kdc, lbm, mac, msp, pbm, pcd, pct, pcx, pgm, pic, png, ppm, psd, psp, ras, rle, sct, tga, wmf, wpg.
• Animation and Video Formats - animated gif, avi, flc, fli, mng, mpeg
• Audio Formats - mid, mp3, wav

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